



/ V f 

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A _ . •*• A> ^> -V 




OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 




Leon Mirman, the Governor of Meurthe-et-Moselle, and 
the refugees for whom he cares. 



OUR PART IN 
THE GREAT WAR 



BY 



ARTHUR GLEASON 

AUTHOR OF "YOUNG HILDA AT THE WARS," "THE SPIRIT 
OF CHRISTMAS," "LOVE, HOME AND THE INNER LIFE," ETC. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 




NEW YORK 

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 






Copyright, 1917, by 
Frederick A. Stokes Company 



All rights reserved, including that of translation 
into foreign languages 



MAY 16 1917 



aA460886 
0"U 



To 

FRANCE ON JULY 14TH 

Three years of world war draw to a close \ as 
France prepares to celebrate the birthday of her lib- 
erty. Never in the thousand years of her tumultuous 
history has she been so calm, so sure of the path she 
treads, red with the blood of her young men. She 
has never drunk any cup of joy so deeply as this 
cup of her agony. In the early months of the war, 
there were doubts and dismays, and the cheap talk of 
compromise. There were black days and black 
moods, and a swaying indecision. But under the 
immense pressure of crisis, France has lifted to a 
clear determination. This war will be fought to a 
■finish. No feeble dreams of peace, entertained by 
loose thinkers and fluent phrase makers, no easy con- 
ciliations, will be tolerated. France has made her 
sacrifice. It remains now that it shall avail. She 
will fulfill her destiny. Time has ceased to matter, 
Death is only an incident in the ongoing of the 
nation. No tortures by mutilation, no horrors of 
shell fire, no massing of machine guns, can swerve 

v 



vi TO FRANCE ON JULY 14™ 

the united will. The "Sacred Union" of Socialist 
and royalist^ peasant and politician, is firm to endure. 
The egoisms and bickerings of easy untested years 
have been drowned in a tide that sets towards the 
Rhine. The premier race of the world goes forth to 
war. That war is only in its beginning. The toll 
of the dead and the wounded may be doubled before 
the gray lines are broken. But they will be broken. 
A menace is to be removed for all time. The German 
Empire is not to rule in Paris. Atrocities are not to 
be justified by success. Spying will be no longer 
the basis of international relationship. France faces 
in one direction. She waits in arms at Revigny and 
along the water courses of the North for the machine 
to crack. That consummation of the long watch 
may be nearer than we guess. It may be many 
months removed. It does not matter, France waits 
in unshattered line, reserve on reserve, ready to the 
call. 

Only once or twice in history has the world wit- 
nessed such a spectacle of greatness at tension. It is 
not that factories are busy on shells. It is that every- 
thing spiritual in a race touched with genius has been 
mobilized. Fineness of feeling, the graces of the in- 
tellect, clarity of thought, all the playful tender 
elements of worthy living are burning with a steady 
light. 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

The author was enabled to visit Verdun and the 
peasant district, and to obtain access to the German 
diaries through J. J. Jusserand, Ambassador of 
France ; Frank H. Simonds, editor of the New York 
Tribune, and Theodore Roosevelt, by whose cour- 
tesy the success of the three months' visit was as- 
sured. On arrival in France the courtesy was con- 
tinued by Emile Hovelaque, Madame Saint-Rene 
Taillandier, Judge Walter Berry, Mrs. Charles 
Prince, Leon Mirman, Prefet de Meurthe-et-Mo- 
selle, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of War. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

To France on July 14.TH v 

SECTION I 

AMERICANS WHO HELPED 

I. The Two Americas 3 

II. The American Ambulance Hospital .... 14 

III. The Ford Car and Its Drivers 34 

IV. The Americans at Verdun 55 

V. "Friends of France" 72 

VI. The Saving Remnant 83 

SECTION II 

WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL 

I. Neutrality: An Interpretation of the Middle West 93 

II. Social Workers and the War 105 

III. Forgetting the American Tradition . . . .116 

IV. Cosmopolitanism 129 

V. The Hyphenates 142 

VI. The Remedy 151 

SECTION III 

THE GERMANS THAT ROSE FROM THE DEAD 

I. Lord Bryce on German Methods . . . .159 

II. Some German War Diaries 170 

III. More Diaries 186 

IV. The Boomerang 196 

ix 



x CONTENTS 

SECTION IV 

THE PEASANTS 

PAGE 

I. The Lost Villages 211 

II. The Homeless 221 

III. "Mon Gamin" 226 

IV. The Mayor on the Hilltop 228 

V. The Little Corporal 240 

VI. The Good Cure 244 

VII. The Three-Year-Old Witness 257 

VIII. MlRMAN AND "MES EnFANTS" 26 1 

IX. An Appeal to the Smaller American Communities 274 

X. The Evidence 289 

XI. Sister Julie 294 

XII. Sister Julie — Continued 312 

Addendum 321 

APPENDIX 

I. To the Reader 329 

II. To Neutral Critics 333 



SECTION I 
AMERICANS WHO HELPED 



THE TWO AMERICAS 

THERE are two Americas to-day : the historic 
America, which still lives in many thou- 
sands of persons, and the new various 
America, which has not completely found itself: a 
people of mixed blood, divergent ideals, intent on 
the work at hand, furious in its pleasures, with the 
vitality of a new race in it, sprinting at top speed in 
a direction it does not yet know, to a goal it cannot 
see. It is in the sweep of an immense experiment, 
accepting all races, centering on no single strain. 

This new joy-riding generation has struck out a 
fresh philosophy of life, which holds that many of 
the old responsibilities can be passed by, that the 
great divide has been crossed, on the hither side of 
which lay poverty, war, sin, pain, fear: the ancient 
enemies of the race. On the further side, which it 
is believed has at last been reached, lie, warm in the 
sun, prosperity and peace, a righteousness of well- 
being. It is a philosophy that fits snugly into a 
new country of tonic climate and economic oppor- 
tunity, distant by three thousand miles from his- 

3 



4 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

toric quarrels and the pressure of crowded neigh- 
borhood. We believe that, by coming on the scene 
with a lot of vitality and good cheer, we can clean 
up the old bothersome problems and make a fresh 
start in the sunshine. Christian Science in a mild 
genial form is the national religion of America. We 
believe that maladies and failures can be willed out 
of existence. As for "the fatalities of history," "an 
endless war between two mutually exclusive ideals," 
we classify that way of thinking with the surplus 
luggage of autocracies. 

Now, there is a wide area in life where this breezy 
burst of power and good-will operates effectively. 
It is salutary for stale vendettas, racial prejudices, 
diseases of the nerves, egoistic melancholias. But 
there are certain structural disturbances at which it 
takes a look and crosses to the other side, preferring 
to maintain its tip-top spirits and its complacency. 
It does not cure a broken arm, and it leaves Belgium 
to be hacked through. The New America trusts its 
melting-pot automatically to remake mixed breeds 
over night into citizens of the Republic. It believes 
that Ellis Island and the naturalization offices 
somehow do something with a laying on of hands 
which results in a nation. Meantime, we go on 
blindly and busily with our markets and base-ball 
and million-dollar films. 

Troubling this enormous optimism of ours came 



THE TWO AMERICAS 5 

suddenly the greatest war of the ages. We were 
puzzled by it for a little, and then took up again 
our work and pleasures, deciding that with the 
causes and objects of this war we were not con- 
cerned. That was the clear decision of the new 
America of many races, many minds. The gifted, 
graceful voice of our President spoke for us what 
already we had determined in the silence. 

But there are those of us that were not satisfied 
with the answer we made. The fluent now-famous 
phrases did not content us. It is for this remnant 
in our population that this book is written. From 
this remnant, many, numbering thousands, put by 
their work and pleasures, and came across the sea, 
some to nurse, and some to carry swift relief over 
dangerous roads ; still others to fight behind trenches 
and over the earth, no few of them to die. Nearly 
forty thousand men have enlisted. Many hundred 
young college boys are driving Red Cross cars at the 
front. There is an American Flying Squadron. 
Many hundreds of American men and women are 
serving in hospitals. Many thousands of hard- 
working, simple Americans at home are devoting 
their spare time and their spare money to relief. 

I give a few illustrations of the American effort. 
I have not tried to show the extent of it. I trust 
some day the work will be catalogued and the full 
account published, as belonging to history. For we 



6 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

have not wholly failed the Allies. I have merely 
sought in this book to cheer myself, and, I trust, 
some friends of "the good old cause, the great idea, 
the progress and freedom of the race." I believe 
that the historic America has spoken and has acted 
in this war. In a time when our country, perplexed 
by its own problems of mixed blood and warring 
ideas, bewildered by its great possessions, busy with 
its own vast work of shaking down a continent, has 
made a great refusal, it is good to have the spectacle 
of some thousands of young Americans, embracing 
poverty, taking dangers and even death gladly. 
There is something of the ancient crusade still stir- 
ring in these bones. The race of Wendell Phillips 
and Whittier has representatives above ground. 
There was an America once that would not have 
stood by when its old-time companion in freedom 
was tasting the bayonet and the flame. Some of that 
America has come down to Chapman and Neville 
Hall, to Seeger, Chapin, Prince, Bonnell. 

Nothing said here is meant to imply that the sum 
of all American efforts is comparable to the gift 
which the men of France and Belgium and England 
have made us. I am only saying that a minority in 
our population has seen that the Allies are fighting 
to preserve spiritual values which made our own 
past great, and which alone can make our future 
worthy. 



THE TWO AMERICAS 7 

That minority, inheriting the traditions of our 
race, bearing old names that have fought for liberty 
in other days, has clearly recognized that no such 
torture has come in recent centuries as German hands 
dealt out in obedience to German orders. In the 
section on French peasants, I have told of that 
suffering. 

In another section, I am speaking to the Ameri- 
cans who remain indifferent to the acts of Germany. 
They are not convinced by the records of eye-wit- 
nesses. The wreck of Belgium is not sufficient. 
Will they, I wonder, be moved, if one rises from 
the dead. W T e shall see, for in this book I give 
the words of those who have, as it were, risen from 
the dead to speak to them. I give the penciled 
records of dead Germans, who left little black books 
to tell these things they did in Flanders and the 
pleasant land of France. 

There are many persons who are more sincerely 
worried lest an injustice of overstatement should 
be done to Germany than they are that Germany 
has committed injustice on Belgium and Northern 
France. The burned houses and murdered peasants 
do not touch them, but any tinge of resentment, any 
sign of anger, in criticizing those acts, moves them 
to protest. Frankly, we of the historic tradition 
are disturbed when we see a wave of excitement 
pass over the country at the arrival of a German 



8 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

submarine — dinners of honor, interviews with the 
"Vikings-Captain — and, in the same month, a per- 
fect calm of indifference greeting the report of the 
French girls of Lille sent away and of families 
broken up and scattered. We that are shocked by 
the cold system of the German conquerors, and pub- 
lish the facts of their methodical cruelty, are rebuked 
by American editors and social workers as exercising 
our heart emotionally at the expense of our head. 
But that hysteria which greets a German officer, 
indirectly helping in the job of perpetuating the 
official German system of murder and arson, is ac- 
cepted as American vivacity, a sort of base-ball 
enthusiasm, and pleasant revelation of sporting 
spirit. 

We believe we are not un-American, in being 
Pro-Ally. We believe we are holding true to the 
ideas which created our country — ideas brought 
across from the best of England, and freshened from 
the soul of France. We believe that Benjamin 
Franklin was an American and a statesman when 
he wrote: — 

"What would you think of a proposition, if I 
should make it, of a family compact between Eng- 
land, France and America? America would be as 
happy as the Sabine girls if she could be the means 
of uniting in perpetual peace her father and her 
husband." 



THE TWO AMERICAS 9 

Cheer the Deutschland in, and U-53,* but permit 
us to go aside a little way and mourn the dead of the 
Lusitania. All we ask, we that are held by some of 
the old loyalties, is that we be not counted un- 
American. We ask you to throw our beliefs, too, 
into the vast new seething mass. Let us contribute 
to the great experiment a little of the old collective 
experience. Because the marching feet of France 
strike a great music in our heart, do not hold us 
alien. We are only remembering what Washington 
knew. He was glad of the feet of those young men 
as they came tramping south to Yorktown. 

* Some of our people go further even than the giving of ban- 
quets to the efficient staff of the Deutschland. They give praise 
to U-53. In a newspaper, edited and owned by Americans, and 
published in an American Middle Western city of 40,000 inhabi- 
tants, the leading editorial on the exploits of U-53 was headed, 
"Hats Off to German Seamen," and the writer says: 

"The world in general that had educated itself to regard the 
German as a phlegmatic and plodding citizen will remove its 
headgear in token of approbation of the sustained series of sensa- 
tional feats by German commanders and sailors. The entire 
aspect of affairs has been changed by the events of two years. 
The Germans have accumulated as much heroic and romantic 
material in that time as has been gathered by other nations since 
the date of the American Revolution." 

In the second section of this book, I have told why we talk 
like that. The mixture of races (mixed but not blended), the 
modern theory of cosmopolitanism, a self-complacency in our 
attitude toward Europe, an assumption that we alone champion 
freedom and justice, the fading of our historic tradition — these 
have caused us to preach internationalism, but fail to defend our- 
selves or the little nation of Belgium. They have led us to 
admire successful force. 



io OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

In the immense labors of the naturalization fac- 
tory, do not pause to excommunicate us, who find 
an ancient, unfaded freedom in England. We are 
moved as Lincoln was moved when he wrote to the 
operatives of Lancashire — Englishmen starving be- 
cause of our blockade, starving but not protesting. 
Lincoln wrote: — 

To the Workingmen of Manchester : I have the honor to 
acknowledge the receipt of the address and resolutions which 
you sent me on the eve of the new year. When I came, on 
the fourth of March, 1861, through a free and constitutional 
election to preside in the Government of the United States, 
the country was found at the verge of civil war. What- 
ever might have been the cause, or whosesoever the fault, one 
duty, paramount to all others, was before me, namely, to 
maintain and preserve at once the Constitution and the integ- 
rity of the Federal Republic. A conscientious purpose to 
perform this duty is the key to all the measures of admin- 
istration which have been and to all which will hereafter be 
pursued. Under our frame of government and my official 
oath, I could not depart from this purpose if I would. It is 
not always in the power of governments to enlarge or re- 
strict the scope of moral results which follow the policies 
that they may deem it necessary for the public safety from 
time to time to adopt. 

I have understood well that the duty of self-preservation 
rests solely with the American people; but I have at the 
same time been aware that favor or disfavor of foreign 
nations might have a material influence in enlarging or pro- 
longing the struggle with disloyal men in which the country 
is engaged. A fair examination of history has served to 



THE TWO AMERICAS n 

authorize a belief that the past actions and influences of the 
United States were generally regarded as having been bene- 
ficial toward mankind. I have, therefore, reckoned upon 
the forbearance of nations. Circumstances — to some of 
which you kindly allude — induce me especially to expect that 
if justice and good faith should be practiced by the United 
States, they would encounter no hostile influence on the part 
of Great Britain. It is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge 
the demonstration you have given of your desire that a spirit 
of amity and peace toward this country may prevail in the 
councils of your Queen, who is respected and esteemed in 
your own country only more than she is by the kindred 
nation which has its home on this side of the Atlantic. 

I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the work- 
ing-men at Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to 
endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously repre- 
sented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which 
was built upon the foundations of human rights, and to sub- 
stitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis 
of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. 
Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the working-men 
of Europe have been subjected to severe trials, for the pur- 
pose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the 
circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances 
upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian hero- 
ism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any coun- 
try. It is indeed an energetic and reinspiring assurance of 
the inherent power of truth, and of the ultimate and uni- 
versal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I do not 
doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be sus- 
tained by your great nation ; and, on the other hand, I have 
no hesitation in assuring you that they will excite admira- 



12 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

tion, esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship 
among the American people. I hail this interchange of senti- 
ment, therefore, as an augury that whatever else may hap- 
pen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my 
own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the 
two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, 
perpetual. 

We believe that Lincoln would have wished his 
people to show a like partizanship to-day in the 
cause of right. Before we all steer quite out of the 
tested channel, let us at least remind you that those 
captains knew the course. It is idle to talk of a 
return to the past. The statesmanship of Franklin 
is not the statesmanship of to-day. What Lincoln 
felt is out of tune with the new America. We must 
go on with the vast new turmoils, the strange un- 
guessed tendencies. We must find a fresh hope 
in the altered world. Meanwhile, be neutral, but 
do not bid us be neutral. You cannot silence us. 
We mean that our ideas shall live and fight and 
finally prevail. 

In one section of this book I deal with what the 
war is teaching us. The peoples of Europe are 
reasserting the rights of nationality. We must un- 
derstand this. We need a wholesome sense of our 
own national being in the America of to-day. 
Nationality is the one great idea in the modern 
world, the one allegiance left us. It has absorbed 
the loyalties and fervor that used to be poured out 



THE TWO AMERICAS 13 

upon art and religion. Groups of persons find emo- 
tional release in the Woman's Movement, in Trades 
Unions, in Socialism. But the one universal ex- 
pression for the entire community is in nationalism, 
the assertion of selfhood as a people. Religious re- 
vivals no longer draw the mind of the mass people. 
But the idea of nationality sweeps them. It gives 
them the sense of kinship, it answers the desire for 
something to which to tie. It is easily possible that 
this idea will fade as the God of the Churches and 
the creative love of beauty faded. The Mazzini 
and Lincoln type of man may pass as the poet and 
the saint, Knights and Samurai, passed. But not 
in our time, not in a few hundred years to come. 
Nationalism may be only one more of the necessary 
"useful lies," one more illusion of the human race. 
But it will serve out our days. The mistake is in 
thinking that the heart of the common people will 
ever be satisfied with a bare mechanic civilization. 
Men are unwilling to live unless they have some- 
thing to die for. We have filled the foreground in 
recent years with new automatic machines, new sub- 
divisions of repetitive process. We tried to empty 
the huge modern world of its old values. Then the 
people came and smashed the structure, and found 
a vast emotional release in the war. The hope of a 
sane future is not in suppressing that dynamic of 
nationality. We must direct it. 



II 



THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 

THE recital of the young college boy crowd- 
ing his ambulance between singing shells 
and bringing in his wounded down death's 
alley is familiar and stirring. And this, for most of 
us, has been the entire story. But that is only the 
first chapter. It is of no value to bring in a wounded 
man, unless there is a field hospital to give him 
swift and wise treatment, unless there is a well- 
equipped hospital-train to run him gently down to 
Paris, unless there are efficient stretcher bearers at 
the railroad station to unload him, and ambulances 
to transport him to new quarters. And finally, most 
important of all, the base hospital that at last re- 
ceives him must be furnished with skilled doctors, 
surgeons, nurses and orderlies, or all the haste of 
transportation has gone for nothing. For it is in 
the base hospital that the final and greatest work 
with the wounded man is wrought out, which will 
let him go forth a whole man, with limbs his own 
and a face unmarred, or will discharge him a wrecked 

14 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 15 

creature, crippled, monstrous, because of bungled 
treatment. It is a chain with no weak link that must 
be forged from the hour of the wounding at Verdun 
to the day of hospital discharge at Neuilly. And 
that final success of the restored soldier is built upon 
the loyalty of hundreds of obscure helpers, far back 
of the lines of glory. That which is fine about it is 
the very absence of the large scale romantic. It is 
humble service humbly given, with no war-medals in 
sight, no mention in official dispatches — only a 
steady fatiguing drive against bugs and dirt and 
germs and red tape. 

So I begin my story with the work of the Scotch- 
American at the entrance of the American Ambu- 
lance Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine. He is the man 
that gives every entering wounded soldier a bath, 
and he does it thoroughly in four and a half min- 
utes. He can bathe twelve inside the hour. He 
has perfected devices, so that a fractured leg won't 
be hurt while the man is being scrubbed. He has 
worked out foot-rests, and body-rests and neck-rests 
in the tub. This man has taken his lowly job and 
made it into one of the important departments of 
the hospital. And with him begins, too, the long 
tale of inventive appliances which are lessening suf- 
fering. The hospital is full of them in each branch 
of the service. Everywhere you go in relief work 
of this war, you see devices — little things that re- 



16 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

lieve pain, and save time and speed up recovery. 
That is one of the things differentiating this war 
from the old-time slaughters, where most of the seri- 
ously wounded died: the omnipresence of mechan- 
ical, electrical, devices. Inventive skill has wreaked 
itself on the sudden awful human need. The hid- 
eously clever bombs, and big guns, all the ingenious 
instruments of torture, will shoot themselves away 
and pass. Rut the innumerable appliances of resto- 
ration, the machinery of welfare, suddenly called 
into being out of the mechanic brain of our time, 
under pressure of the agonizing need, will go on 
with their ministry when Lorraine is again green. 

The Ambulance is the cheeriest, the cleanest, the 
most efficient place which I have visited since the 
beginning of the war. There is no hospital odor 
anywhere. Fresh air and sunshine are in the wards. 
A vagrant from Mars or the moon, who wanted an 
answer to some of his questions about the lay-out 
of things, would find his quest shortened by spend- 
ing an afternoon at the American Ambulance. 

What does America mean 4 ? What is it trying to 
do"? How does it differ from other sections of the 
map? 

The swift emergency handling of each situation 
has been American in its executive efficiency. Things 
have been done in a hurry, and done well. In 
eighteen days this building was taken over from a 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 17 

partially completed school, with the refuse of con- 
struction work heaped high, and made into an ac- 
tively-running hospital ready for 175 patients. 
That, too, in those early days of war, when work- 
men had been called to the colors, when money was 
unobtainable, transportation tied up, and Germany 
pounding down on Paris. 

The skillful surgical work, some of it pioneering 
in fields untouched by former experience, has been 
a demonstration of the best American practice. 

The extraordinarily varied types of persons at 
work under one roof in a democracy of service pre- 
sents just the aspect of our community which is 
most representative. Millionaires and an imper- 
sonator, Harvard, Dartmouth, Tech, Columbia, 
Fordham, Michigan, Princeton, Cornell and Yale 
men, ranchers, lawyers, and newspaper men — all are 
hard at work on terms of exact equality. A colored 
man came in one day. He said he wanted to help 
with the wounded. He was tried out, and proved 
himself one of the best helpers in the organization. 
He received the same treatment as all other helpers, 
eating with them, liked by them. Some weeks later, 
one of our wealthy "high-life" young Americans 
volunteered his services. After the first meal he 
came wrathfully to the surgeon. 

"I've had to eat at the same table with a negro. 



18 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

That must be changed. What will you do about 
it?" 

"Do about it," answered the surgeon. "You will 
do one of two things — go and apologize to a better 
man than you are, or walk out of this hospital." 

Recently this black helper came to the director 
in distress of mind. 

"Have to leave you," he said. He held out a 
letter from the motor car firm, near Paris, where he 
he had worked before the war. It was a request for 
him to return at once. If he did not obey now in 
this time of need, it meant there would never be any 
position for him after the war as long as he lived. 

A day or two later he came again. 

"My old woman and I have been talking it over," 
he said, "and I just can't leave this work for the 
wounded. We'll get along some way." 

A little more time passed, and then, one day, he 
stepped up to the director and said : 

"I want you to meet my boss." 

The superintendent of the motor car factory had 
come. He said to the director: 

"I have received the most touching letter from 
this darkey, saying he couldn't come back to us be- 
cause he must help here. Now I want to tell you 
that his position is open to him any time that he 
wants it, during the war, or after it." 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 19 

Visitors, after walking through the wards, smell- 
ing no odors, hearing no groans, seeing the faces of 
the men smiling back at them, are constantly saying 
to the director: 

"Ah, I see you have no really serious cases here." 

It is the only kind of case sent to Neuilly — the 
gravely wounded man, the "grands blesses" requir- 
ing infinite skill to save the limb and life. So sweet 
and hopeful is the "feel" of the place that not even 
575 beds of men in extremity can poison that atmos- 
phere of successful practice. Alice's Queen had a 
certain casual promptness in saying, "Off with his 
head," whenever she sighted a subject. And there 
was some of the same spirit in the old-time war- 
surgeon when he was confronted with a case of 
multiple fracture. "Amputate. Off with his leg. 
Off with his arm." And that, in the majority of 
cases, was the same as guillotining the patient, for 
the man later died from infection. There was a 
surgical ward in one of the 1870 Paris hospitals 
with an unbroken record of death for every major 
operation. At the American Ambulance, out of the 
first 3,100 operations, there were 81 amputations. 
The death rate for the first year was 4.46 per cent. 

These gunshot injuries, involving compound and 
multiple fractures, are treated by incision, and drain- 
age of the infected wounds and the removal of 
foreign bodies. A large element in the success has 



20 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

been the ingenuity of the staff in creating appli- 
ances that give efficient drainage to the wound and 
comfort to the patient. The same inventive skill is 
at work in the wards that we saw on entering the 
hospital in the bathroom of the Scotch-American. 
These devices, swinging from a height over the bed, 
are slats of wood to which are jointed the splints 
for holding the leg or arm in a position where the 
wound will drain without causing pain to the re- 
cumbent man. The appearance of a ward full of 
these swinging appliances is a little like that of a 
gymnasium. Half the wounded men riding into 
Paris ask to be taken to the American Hospital. 
They know the high chance of recovery they will 
have there and the personal consideration they will 
receive. The Major-General enjoys the best which 
the Hospital can offer. So does the sailor boy from 
the Fusiliers Marins. 

We had spent about an hour in the wards. We 
had seen the flying man who had been shot to pieces 
in the air, but had sailed back to his own lines, made 
his report and collapsed. We had talked with the 
man whose face had been obliterated, and who was 
now as he had once been, except for a little ridge of 
flesh on his lower left cheek. I had seen a hundred 
men brighten as the surgeon "jollied" them. The 
cases were beginning to merge for me into one gen- 
eral picture of a patient, contented peasant in a 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 21 

clean bed with a friend chatting with him, and the 
gift of fruit or a bottle of champagne on the little 
table by his head. I was beginning to lose the sense 
of the personal in the immense, well-conducted insti- 
tution, with its routine and system. After all, these 
men represented the necessary wastage of war, and 
here was a business organization to deal with these 
by-products. I was forgetting that it was some- 
body's husband in front of me, and only thinking 
that he was a lucky fellow to be in such a well- 
ordered place. 

Then the whole sharp individualizing work of the 
war came back in a stab, for we had reached the 
bed of the American boy who had fought with the 
Foreign Legion since September, 1914. 

"Your name is Bonnell ?" I asked. 

"Yes." 

"Do you spell it B-o-n-n-e double 1?" 

"Yes." 

"By any chance, do you know a friend of mine, 
Charles Bonnell?" 

"He's my uncle." 

And right there in the presence of the boy in blue- 
striped paj amas, my mind went back over the years. 
Twenty-seven years ago, I had come to New York, 
and grown to know the tall, quiet man, six feet two 
he was, and kind to small boys. He was head of a 
book-store then and now. For these twenty-seven 



22 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

years I have known him, one of my best friends, 
and here was his nephew. 

"Do you think I'm taller than my uncle?" the 
boy asked, standing up. He stood erect : you would 
never have known there was any trouble down be- 
low. But as my eye went up and down the fine 
slim figure, I saw that his right leg was off at the 
knee. 

"I can't play base-ball any more," he said. 

"No, but you can go to the games," said the 
director; "that's all the most of us do. 

"I wish I had come here sooner," he went on as 
he sat back on the bed: standing was a strain. He 
meant he might have saved his leg. 

We came away. 

"Now he wants to go into the flying corps," said 
the surgeon. 

He still had his two arms, and the loss of a leg 
didn't so much matter when you fly instead of 
march. 

"Flying is the only old-fashioned thing left," re- 
marked the boy, in a later talk. "You might as 
well work in a factory as fight in a trench — only 
there's no whistle for time off." 

I have almost omitted the nurses from this chap- 
ter, because we have grown so used to loyalty and 
devotion in women that these qualities in them do 
not constitute news. The trained nurses of the 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 23 

Ambulance Hospital, with half a dozen exceptions, 
are Americans, with a long hospital experience at 
home. During the early months they served with 
no remuneration. An allowance of 100 francs a 
month has now been established. They reluctantly 
accepted this, as each was anxious to continue on the 
purely voluntary basis. There are also volunteer 
auxiliary nurses, who serve as assistants to the 
trained women. The entire nursing staff has been 
efficient and self-sacrificing. 

We entered the department where some of the 
most brilliant surgical work of the war has been 
done. It is devoted to those cases where the face 
has been damaged. The cabinet is filled with photo- 
graphs, the wall is lined with masks, revealing the 
injury when the wounded man entered, and then 
the steps in the restoration of the face to its original 
structure and look. There in front of me were the 
reproductions of the injury: the chin shot away, 
the cheeks in shreds, the mouth a yawning aperture, 
holes where once was a nose — all the ghastly pranks 
of shell-fire tearing away the structure, wiping out 
the human look. Masks were there on the wall of 
man after man who would have gone back into 
life a monster, a thing for children to run from, 
but brought back inside the human race, restored to 
the semblance of peasant father, the face again the 
recorder of kindly expression. The surgeon and the 



24 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

dental expert work together on these cases. The 
success belongs equally to each of the two men. 
Between them they make a restoration of function 
and of appearance. 

In peace days, a city hospital would have only 
three or four fractures of the jaw in a year, and 
they were single fractures. There are no accidents 
in ordinary life to produce the hideous results of 
shell-fire. So there was no experience to go on. 
There were no reference books recording the treat- 
ment of wounds to the face caused by the projectiles 
of modern warfare. Hideous and unprecedented 
were the cases dumped by the hundreds into the 
American Ambulance. Because of the pioneer suc- 
cess of this hospital, the number of these cases has 
steadily increased. They are classified as "gunshot 
wounds of the face, involving the maxillse, and re- 
quiring the intervention of dental surgery." These 
are compound fractures of the jaw, nearly always 
accompanied by loss of the soft parts of the mouth 
and chin, sometimes by the almost complete loss of 
the face. 

I have seen this war at its worst. I have seen 
the largest hospital in France filled with the griev- 
ously-wounded. I have seen the wounded out in 
the fields of Ypres, waiting to be carried in. I have 
seen the Maison Blanche thronged with the Army 
of the Mutilated. I have carried out the dead from 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 25 

hospital and ambulance, and I have watched them 
lie in strange ways where the great shell had struck. 
But death is a pleasant gift, and the loss of a limb 
is light. For death leaves a rich memory. And a 
crippled soldier is dearer than he ever was to the 
little group that knows him. But to be made into 
that which is terrifying to the children that were 
once glad of him, to bring shrinking to the woman 
that loved him — that is the foulest thing done by 
war to the soldier. So it was the most gallant of 
all relief work that I have seen — this restoration of 
disfigured soldiers to their own proper appearance. 
And the work of these hundreds of Americans at 
Neuilly was summed for me in the person of one 
dental surgeon, who sat a few feet from those forty 
masks and those six hundred photographs, working 
at a plaster-cast of a shattered jaw. He was very 
much American — rangy and loose- jointed, with a 
twang and a drawl, wondering why the blazes a 
writing person was bothering a man at work. It was 
his time off, after six days of patient fitting of part 
to part, and that for a year. So he was taking his 
day off to transform one more soldier from a raw 
pulp to a human being. There were no motor car 
dashes, and no military medals, for him. Only hard 
work on suffering men. There he sat at his pioneer 
work in a realm unplumbed by the mind of man. 
It called on deeper centers of adventure than any 



26 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

jungle-exploration or battle-exploit. It was science 
at its proper business of salvation. Those Krupp 
howitzers were not to have their own way, after all. 
Here he was, wiping out all the foul indignities 
which German scientists had schemed in their labo- 
ratories. 

Two days later, I saw the boys of the American 
Ambulance unload the wounded of Verdun from the 
famous American train. The announcement of the 
train's approach was simple enough — these words 
scribbled in pencil by the French authorities : 

"12 Musulman 

"241 Blesses 

"8 Officiers 

"1 Malade 

"Train Americain de Revigny." 

Those twelve "Musulman" are worth pausing 
with for a moment. They are Mohammedans of 
the French colonies, who must be specially fed be- 
cause their religion does not permit them to eat of 
the unholy food of unbelievers. So a hospital pro- 
vides a proper menu for them. 

Add the figures, and you have 262 soldiers on 
stretchers to be handled by the squad of 38 men 
from the American Ambulance. They marched up 
the platform in excellent military formation. The 
train rolled in, and they jumped aboard, four to 
each of the eight large cars, holding 36 men each. 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 27 

In twenty-seven minutes they had cleared the train, 
and deposited the stretchers on the platforms. There 
the wounded pass into the hands of French order- 
lies, who carry them to the French doctors in wait- 
ing in the station. As quickly the doctor passed the 
wounded, the boys took hold again and loaded the 
ambulances en route to Paris hospitals. It was all 
breathless, perspiring work, but without a slip. 
There is never a slip, and that is why they are do- 
ing this work. The American Ambulance has the 
job of unloading three-fourths of all the wounded 
that come into Paris. The boys are strong and sure- 
handed, and the War Ministry rests easy in letting 
them deal with this delicate, important work. They 
feel pride in a prompt clean-cut job. But, more 
than that, they have a deep inarticulate desire to 
make things easier for a man in pain. I saw the 
boys pick up stretcher after stretcher as it lay on 
the platform and hurry it to the doctor. That 
wasn't their job at all. Their job was only to unload 
the train, but they could not let a wounded man lie 
waiting for red tape. I watched one long-legged 
chap who ran from the job he had just completed 
to each new place of need, doing three times as 
much work as even his strenuous duty called for. 

"Look here," I said to Budd, the young Texan, 
who is Lieutenant of the Station squad. I pointed 
to a man on a stretcher. My eye had only shown me 



28 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

that the sight was strange and pathetic. But his 
quicker eye caught that the man needed help. He 
ran over to him and struck a match as he went. The 
soldier had his face swathed in bandages. Arms 
and hands were thick with bandages, so that every 
gesture he made was bungling. He had a cigarette 
in his mouth, just clear of the white linen. But he 
couldn't bring a match and the box together in his 
muffled hands so as to get a light. He was making 
queer, unavailing motions, like a baby's. In another 
second he was contentedly smoking and telling his 
story. A hand grenade which he was throwing had 
exploded prematurely in his hands and face. 

Work at the front is pretty good fun. There is 
a lot of camaraderie with the fighting men : the ex- 
change of a smoke and a talk, and the sense of being 
at the center of things. The war zone, whatever 
its faults, is the focal point of interest for all the 
world. It is something to be in the storm center of 
history. But this gruelling unromantic work back 
in Paris is lacking in all those elements. No one 
claps you on the back, and says: 

"Big work, old top. We've been reading about 
you. Glad you got your medal. It must be hell 
under fire. But we always knew you had it in you. 
Come around to the Alumni Association banquet and 
give us a talk. Prexy will be there, and we'll put 
you down for the other speech of the evening." 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 29 

What the people say is this : 

"Ah, back in Paris, were you? Not much to do 
there, I guess. Must have been slow. Couldn't work 
it to get the front? Well, we can't all be heroes. 
Have you met Dick? He was at Verdun, you know. 
Big time. Had a splinter go through his hood. Bet- 
ter come round to our annual feed, and hear him tell 
about it. So long. See you again." 

But the boys themselves know, and the hurt sol- 
diers know, and the War Minister of France knows. 
These very much unadvertised young Americans, 
your sons and brothers, reader, often sit up all night 
waiting for a delayed train. 

These boys of ours, shifting stretchers, wheeling 
legless men to a place in the sun, driving ambu- 
lances, are the most fortunate youth in fifty }^ears. 
They are being infected by a finer air than any that 
has blown through our consciousness since John 
Brown's time. And the older Americans over here 
have that Civil War tradition in their blood. They 
are gray-haired and some of them white-haired. 
For, all over our country, individual Americans are 
breaking from the tame herd and taking the old 
trail, again, the trail of hardships and sacrifice. 
They have found something wrong with America, 
and want to make it right. I saw it in the man 
from Philadelphia, a well-to-do lawyer who crossed 
in the boat with me. He was gray-haired, the 



30 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

father of three children, one a boy of twenty-one. 
He was taking his first real vacation after a life- 
time of concentrated successful work. I saw him 
lifting stretchers out of the Verdun train. 

Boys and old men with an equal faith. The gen- 
eration that isn't much represented over here is that 
of the in-betweeners, men between thirty-five and 
fifty years of age. They grew up in a time when 
our national patriotism was sagging, when security 
and fat profits looked more inviting than sacrifice 
for the common good. Our country will not soon 
be so low again as in the period that bred these total 
abstainers from the public welfare. The men and 
boys who have worked here are going to return to 
our community — several hundred have already re- 
turned — with a profound dissatisfaction with our 
national life as it has been conducted in recent years. 

I have left the American train standing at the 
platform all this time, but it rests there till the 
afternoon, for it takes three hours to clean it for 
its trip back to the front. Only three hours — one 
more swift job by our contingent. It is the best 
ambulance train in France. The huge luggage vans 
of the trans-continental expresses were requisitioned. 
Two American surgeons and one French Medecin 
Chef travel with the wounded men. It carries 240 
stretchers and 24 sitting cases in its eight cars for 
"Les blesses." The five other cars are devoted to 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 31 

an operating room, a kitchen for bouillon, a dining 
car, a sleeping car for the surgeons, and the other 
details of administration. Safety, speed and com- 
fort are its slogan. The stretchers rest on firm 
wooden supports riding on an iron spring. The 
entire train is clean, sweet smelling, and travels 
easily. J. E. Rochfort, who has charge of it, went 
around to the men on stretchers as they lay on the 
platform. 

"You rode easily*?" he asked. 

"Tres bien: tres confortable" 

If an emergency case develops during the long 
ride, the train stops while the operation is performed. 
It is also held up at times by the necessities of war. 
For the wounded must be side-tracked for more 
important items of military demand — shells, food, 
fresh troops. 

Village and town along its route turn out and 
throng the station to see the "Train Americain" The 
exterior of the cars carries a French flag at one end, 
and, at the other, the American flag. I like to think 
of our flag, painted on the brown panel of every car 
of the great train, and brightly scoured each day, 
riding through France from Verdun to Paris, from 
Biarritz to Revigny, and the thousands of simple 
people watching its progress, knowing its precious 
freight of wounded, saying, "Le train Americain" 
as they sight the painted emblem. It is where it be- 



32 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

longs — side by side with the Tricolor. There isn't a 
great question loose on the planet to-day, where the 
best of us isn't in accord with the best of France. 

That is the biggest thing we are doing over there, 
carrying a message of good-will from the Yser to 
Relfort, up and down and clear across France, and 
"every town and every hamlet has heard" not our 
"trumpet blast," but the whirr of our rescue motors 
and the sweetly running wheels of our express. It 
is one with the work of the Ambulance Hospital, 
where, after the bitter weeks of healing, the young 
soldier of France receives his discharge from hos- 
pital. Looking on the photograph and plaster cast 
of what shell-fire had made of him, and seeing him- 
self restored to the old manner of man, he has a 
feeling of friendliness for the Americans who saved 
him from the horror that might have been. The 
man whose bed lay next walks out on his own two 
legs instead of hobbling crippled for the rest of his 
life, and he remembers those curious devices of 
swinging splints, which eased the pain and saved 
the leg. He, too, holds a kindly feeling for the 
nation that has made him not only a well man, but 
a whole man. And America has two more friends in 
France, in some little village of the province. 

This work of the hospital, the train, the motor 
ambulance, is doing away with the shock and hurt 
of our aloofness. These young Americans, stretcher- 
bearers and orderlies, surgeons and nurses, drivers 



AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 33 

and doctors, are unconscious statesmen. They are 
building for us a better foreign policy. It is a long 
distance for friendly voices of America to carry 
across the Atlantic. But these helpers are on the 
spot, moving among the common people and creat- 
ing an international relationship which not even the 
severe strain of a dreary aloofness can undo. Our 
true foreign policy is being worked out at Neuilly 
and through the war-cursed villages. This is our 
answer to indifference: the gliding of the immense 
train through France, carrying men in agony to a 
sure relief; the swift, tender handling of those 
wounded in their progress from the trench to the 
ward; the making over of these shattered soldiers 
into efficient citizens. 

The quarrel none of ours? 

The suffering is very much ours. 

Too proud to fight? 

Not too proud to carry bed-pans and wash mud- 
caked, blood-marked men. Not too proud to be shot 
at in going where they lie. 

Neutrality of word and thought? 

We are the friends of these champions of all the 
values we hold dear. 

War profits out of their blood? 

Many hundreds have given up their life-work, 
their career, their homes, to work in lowly ways, 
with no penny of profit, no hope of glory, "just 
because she's France." 



Ill 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 

THIS is the story of the American Ambu- 
lance Field Service in the words of the 
boys themselves who drove the cars. Fresh 
to their experience, they jotted down the things that 
happened to them in this strange new life of war. 
These notes, sometimes in pencil, sometimes writ- 
ten with the pocket fountain pen, they sent to their 
chief, Piatt Andrew, and he has placed these un- 
published day-by-day records of two hundred men 
at my disposal. Anybody would be stupid who 
tried to rewrite their reports. I am simply passing 
along what they say. 

One section of the Field Service with twenty cars 
was thrown out into Alsace for the campaign on the 
crest of Hartmannsweilerkopf . Here is some of the 
fiercest fighting of the war. Hartmannsweilerkopf 
is the last mountain before the Plain of the Rhine, 
and commands that valley. The hill crest was taken 
and retaken. Here, too, is the one sector of the 
Western Front where the French are fighting in the 

34 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 35 

enemy's country. Alsace has been German territory 
for forty-three years. The district known as Haute 
Alsace is a range of mountains, running roughly 
north and south; to the east lies German Alsace, 
to the west the level country of French Alsace. On 
the crest of the mountains the armies of France and 
Germany have faced each other. The business of 
the ambulances has been to bring wounded from 
those heights to the railway stations in the plain 
John Melcher, Jr., says of this work: 
"The mountain service consists in climbing to 
the top of a mountain, some 4,000 feet high, where 
the wounded are brought to us. Two cars are al- 
ways kept in a little village down the mountain on 
the other side. This little village is a few kilometers 
behind the trenches, and is sometimes bombarded 
by the Germans. The roads up the mountain are 
very steep, particularly on the Alsatian side. They 
are rough and so narrow that in places vehicles can- 
not pass. These roads are full of ruts, and at some 
points are corduroy, the wood practically forming 
steps. On one side there is always a sheer preci- 
pice." 

"If you go off the road," writes one of our young 
drivers, "it is probably to stay, and all the while 
a grade that in some parts has to be rushed in low 
speed to be surmounted. Add to this the fact that 
in the rainy (or usual) weather of the Vosges, the 



36 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

upper half is in the clouds, and seeing becomes nearly 
impossible, especially at night. Before our advent 
the wounded were transported in wagons or on mule- 
backs, two stretchers, one on each side of the mule. 
Two of us tried this method of travel and were 
nearly sick in a few minutes. Imagine the wounded 
— five hours for the trip! That so many survived 
speaks well for the hardihood of the "Blue Devils." 
Now with our cars the trip takes \y 2 or 2 hours. 
We get as close to the trenches as any cars go. Our 
wounded are brought to us on trucks like wheelbar- 
rows, or, at night, on mules, about one-half hour 
after the wound is received. This is hard service for 
both cars and drivers, and it is done in turn for five 
days at a time; then we return to St. Maurice to 
care for the cars and rest; the ordinary valley serv- 
ice is regarded by us as rest after the spell on the 
hills. 

"Car 170 (the E. J. de Coppet Car) has been 
doing well on this strenuous work. The two back 
fenders have been removed, one by a rock in passing 
an ammunition wagon, and the other by one of the 
famous "75's" going down the hill. 

"The men appreciate it. Often, back in France, 
we are trailed as the 'voitures' they have seen at Mitt- 
lach, or as the car which brought a comrade back. 
They express curiosity as to our exact military 
status. The usual thing when we explain that we 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 37 

are volunteers is for them to say "chic." When they 
learn that the cars are given by men in the United 
States whose sympathy is with them, they nod ap- 
proval." 

Another man writes of the condition of the serv- 
ice: 

"At Chenimenil, the headquarters of the automo- 
bile service for this section, we reported to Captain 
Arboux, and were informed by him of the terms 
on which he had decided to accept our services. We 
were to draw our food, wine, tobacco, automobile 
supplies, such as tires, oil, gasoline, from the Sev- 
enth Army, as well as our lodging, and one sou a 
day as pay. In short, we were to be treated exactly 
as the French Ambulance sections, and to be sub- 
ject to the same discipline." 

Rations consist of a portion of meat, hard bread 
— baked some weeks previously — rice, beans, maca- 
roni or potatoes, a lump of grease for cooking, coffee, 
sugar and a little wine. For soldiers on duty there 
are field kitchens, fire and boilers running on wheels. 
But billeted men have their food cooked by some 
village woman, or a group build wood fires against 
a wall. Our men made arrangements to mess at a 
restaurant. 

The work was so continuous that some of the men 
drove for as long as fifty hours without sleep, and 



38 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

no one had time for more than an occasional nap 
of an hour and a half. 

After the battle of Hartmannsweilerkopf the sec- 
tion was decorated as a whole, and twelve men in- 
dividually were decorated. Lovering Hill of Har- 
vard has been in charge of this section. He has 
received two citations, two Croix de Guerre, which 
he doesn't wear, because he knows that the Western 
Front is full of good men who have not been deco- 
rated. The boys formed "The Harvard Club of 
Alsace Reconquise," and had Harvard Alumni Din- 
ners when the fighting eased up. 

"I think that we have saved the wounded many 
hours of suffering," writes Henry M. Suckley of 
Harvard, 1910. In that quiet statement lies the 
spirit of the work done by the American Field Serv- 
ice. 

From the head of the Valley of the Fecht, over 
10 miles of mountain, 5 up and 5 down, to Krut on 
the other side — that has been the run. 

W. K. H. Emerson, Jr., says: 

"Once I went over a bank in an attempt to pass 
a convoy wagon at night without a headlight, such 
light being forbidden over part of the Mitlach road. 
I was lucky enough to lean up against a tree before 
slipping very far over the bank, and within ten min- 
utes ten soldiers had lifted the machine, and put 
it back on the road, ready to start. Nothing was 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 39 

wrong but the loss of one sidelight, and the car went 
better than before. There was great merriment 
among the men who helped to put it on the road." 

After four months the section had its barracks, at 
the 4,000-foot level, blown down by a gale. So 
they used a new road. Suckley writes of finding 
two huge trees across the path. 

"I had three wounded men in the car, whom I 
was hurrying to the hospital. I walked down two 
miles to get some men at a camp of engineers, the 
road being too narrow to permit turning. There is 
a new service to the famous Hartmannsweilerkopf, 
or, rather, within half a mile of this most southerly 
mount contested by the Germans. For three miles 
it is cut out of the solid rock, just wide enough for 
one of our cars to pass. You can imagine the joys 
of this drive on a dark night when you have to ex- 
tinguish all lights, and when the speed of the car 
cannot be reduced for fear of not making the grades. 
The first aid post, called Silberloch, is but 200 or 
300 yards from the famous crest which has been 
the scene of many fierce combats. The bursting of 
shells has taken every bit of foliage from the wooded 
crest, carried pines to the ground, so that only a 
few splintered stumps stick up here and there. At 
the post no one dares show himself in the open. All 
life is subterranean in bomb-proofs covered by five 
feet of timber. The road is concealed everywhere 



4 o OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

by screens, and the sound of a motor may bring a 
hail of shells down on your head. The stretcher 
bearers are so used to meeting death in its worst 
forms — by burning oil, by shell fragments, by suf- 
focating shells — that they have grown to look at it 
smilingly." 

It is a St. Paul's School car that operates there. 

"Another time the run was up to an artillery post 
in the mountains. The road was extremely steep 
near the top, and covered with gravel. It was only 
by hard effort that a dozen men could push the car 
up. We ran to the communicating trench, where 
they had the man waiting. He was wounded in the 
abdomen, and in great pain. We started down over 
the terrible road; at every pebble he would groan. 
When we reached the worst place of all, where the 
road had recently been mended with unbroken stones, 
his groans began to grow fainter. They ceased, and, 
stopping, we found that he was dead. But there 
had been a chance of saving his life. A larger car 
could not have gone up. A wagon or a mule would 
have caused his death almost immediately. 

"On one of our hills in winter a team of six Red 
Cross men was kept on duty waiting for our ambu- 
lance to come along. The cars would go as far as 
possible up the incline, and before they lost speed 
would be practically carried to the crest on the 
shoulders of the pushers — mules, with their drivers 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 41 

hanging on the beasts' tails to make the ascent easier. 
Strapped on these animals are barbed wire and hand- 
grenades, red wine and sections of the army portable 
houses." 

Such is winter in Alsace. 

"Luke Doyle had driven his car to the entrance of 
the Hartmanns trenches and our last post, when a 
heavy bombardment forced every one to make for 
the bomb-proof. Several men were wounded and 
he came out to crank his car and carry them off when 
he was ordered back to safety. A few moments later 
a shell landed close to the 'abri.' It struck a man 
and killed him. A flying piece reached Doyle and 
entered his elbow. Another of our section, Douglas, 
arrived, and was knocked flat by a bursting shell. 
He rose, put Doyle in his car and drove him up the 
road to safety." 

Another time, Jack Clark writes : 

"Car 161 still lives up to her reputation. Yester- 
day, in a blizzard, she was blown off the road be- 
tween two trees, over three piles of rock, through a 
fence and into a ditch. Three men and a horse re- 
moved her from the pasture, and she went on as 
ever." 

Car 163 had 13 cases of tire trouble in two weeks. 
The whole success of the adventure depends on the 
condition of the cars. So through all the narrative 
of shell-fire and suffering men recurs the theme of 



42 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

roads and tires, axle-trouble and hill-grades. The 
adventure of the car itself is as real as that of the 
man. The car becomes a personality to the man at 
the wheel, just as the locomotive is to the engineer. 
It isn't any old car. It is the little Ford, Number 
121, given by Mrs. Richard Trowbridge of Rox- 
bury, Mass. In that particular car you have car- 
ried 500 wounded men, you have gone into the ditch, 
stuck in the mud, and scurried under shell-fire, shrap- 
nel has torn the cover, and there is the mark of a 
rifle-bullet on the wheel-spoke. You have slept at 
the wheel and in the chassis, after hours of work. 
You have eaten luncheons for two months on the 
front seat. The reader must not get very far away 
from the ambulance-car in making his mental pic- 
ture of the experience of the boys in North France, 
and he must not object if all through this chapter 
he gets the smell of grease and petrol, and if the 
explosions are tires as often as shells. Because that 
is the way it is at the front. These boys never take 
their eyes from the road and the car. So why should 
we who read of them 4 ? 

There is a certain Detroit manufacturer who has 
a large and legitimate advertisement coming to him. 
If he will collect the hundred fervid and humorous 
comments written into the records of the field serv- 
ice he will have a publicity pamphlet which will out- 
live "A Message to Garcia." For this job of the 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 43 

jitneys is more than carrying orders; it is bringing 
wounded men over impossible routes, where four 
wheels and a motor were never supposed to go. Mr. 
Ford with his ship accomplished nothing, but Mr. 
Ford with his cars has done much in getting the boys 
out of the trenches. They would have lain there 
wounded for an hour, two hours, in the Alsace dis- 
trict for twelve hours longer, if his nimble jitneys 
had not chugged up to the boyau and dressing station. 

"We expected to be kept rolling all night." To 
"keep rolling" is their phrase for driving the car. 

"The next sixty hours were not divided into days 
for us. We ran steadily, not stopping for meals or 
sleep except during the brief pauses in the stream 
of wounded. Except for one memorable and enor- 
mous breakfast at the end of the first 24 hours, I 
ate while driving, steering with one hand, holding 
bread and cheese in the other. The first lull I slept 
an hour and a half, the second night there was no 
lull and I drove until I went to sleep several times 
at the wheel. Then I took three hours' rest and 
went on. Gasoline, oil and carbide ran low; we used 
all our spare tires. One of our men ran into a ditch 
with three seriously wounded soldiers, and upset. 
Another man broke his rear axle. During the two 
and one-half days of the attack, over 250 wounded 
were moved by our 15 cars a distance of 40 kilo- 



44 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Ambulance work depends on the supply of gaso- 
line, oil, carbide and spare parts, solid rations and 
sleep. Success rests in patching tires, scraping car- 
bon and changing springs. Any idea of ambulance 
work is off the mark that thinks it a succession of 
San Juan charges. It is hard, unpicturesque work, 
with an occasional fifteen minutes of tension. 

"A stretcher makes a serviceable bed, and, warmly 
wrapped in blankets, one can sleep very comfortably 
in an ambulance." 

"A climb of 800 meters in less than 10 kilometers 
involves mechanical stress." 

"The unique spring suspension and light body 
construction make our cars the most comfortable for 
the wounded of all the types in service." 

A mechanical detail — but it is in these bits of 
ingenious mechanical adaptation to human needs 
that the American contribution has been made. It 
isn't half enough in a machine-made war to be dash- 
ing and picturesque. You must fight destructive ma- 
chinery with still cleverer engines of relief. The in- 
ventive brain must operate as well as the kind heart 
and the spirit of fearlessness. It is in the combina- 
tion of courage and mechanical versatility that the 
best of the American quality has been revealed. 

Flashes of the soldier life are given by the boys. 
Canned beef is called by the poilu "singe," or 
monkey meat. 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 45 

"All that is impossible is explained by a simple 
'c'est la guerre.' Why else blindly scrape one's way 
past a creaking truck of shells, testing 20 horses, two 
abreast, steaming in their own cloud of sweaty 
vapor? Why else descend slopes with every brake 
afire, with three human bodies as cargo, where a 
broken drive shaft leaves but one instantaneous 
twist of the wheel for salvation, a thrust straight 
into the bank, smashing the car but saving its load? 
'C'est la guerre.' " 

"'Chasseurs Alpines': a short, dark-blue jacket, 
gray trousers, spiral puttees, and the jaunty soft hat 
'berets.' These are the famous 'blue devils.' " 

"I, who came for four months and have been 
working eight, can assure any one who is consider- 
ing joining the American Ambulance that he will 
go home with a feeling of great satisfaction at hav- 
ing been able to help out a little a nation that appre- 
ciates it, and that is bearing the brunt of the fight- 
ing on the Western Front." 

"Among the wounded that our cars carried, was 
the General of the Division — General Serret" — 
brought down from the height he had held to be 
amputated and to die. 

Another section of twenty-four cars started in at 
Esternay at the time of the spring freshets, when 
life was chilly and wet. Eleven received individ- 
ually the Croix de Guerre. This section served two 



46 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

divisions of the second French Army and had a 
battle front of from seven to ten miles — the St. 
Mihiel sector, a region subject to artillery fire. It 
has been commanded by Oliver Hazard Perry, a 
descendant of Commodore Perry. 

They had 1,800 wounded a week, and a mileage 
of 5,000 kilometers. 

"Sudbury broke his arm cranking, this morning." 

The service was brisk. Shroder with two wounded 
was rounding a corner when a shell hit so close as 
to jump his car up. One car came in from service 
in July with 23 shrapnel holes. On July 8, within 
24 hours, the boys of this section carried 997 
wounded. 

"During the bombardment the trenches were so 
smashed by continuous fire as to cease to be trenches : 
the men lay in holes in the ground. They would 
come down when relieved, dazed and sometimes 
weeping, yet they held their ground." Long waits 
and frantic activity : dullness and horror alternating. 
Nine members of the ambulances were in the house 
against which a shell exploded. A soldier was killed 
and one mortally wounded. The Americans were 
thrown in a heap on the floor. "Now, the section 
occupies a large house just outside the town. There 
is a large hole in the garden where a shell alighted 
soon after this became our new quarters; but the 
good fortune of the Ambulance is with it still." 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 47 

"To Clos Bois. Sharp shrapnel fire. Small 
branches and leaves showered down in the wood. It 
was necessary for two of our men, whose ambu- 
lances stood in the open to expose themselves in 
putting stretchers in the cars. Great courage was 
displayed by McConnell, who was active in this 
work even when not required to be so, and who 
was hit in the back by a fragment of shell, sustain- 
ing, however, no further injury than a bad bruise. 
Mention should be made of Martin, who drove away 
with his car full of wounded while the firing was 
still going on, a bullet mark in his steering-gear, 
and a spare tire on the roof punctured." 

The order of the day, July 22, cited the American 
section, "Composed of volunteers, friends of our 
country." 

Here are a half dozen impressions that come to 
the men in the course of their work. 

"I counted one evening fifteen balls, within a 
space of a dozen yards of the doorway where I was 
sheltering." 

"The dark houses, deserted streets, the dim shape 
of a sentry, the night scents of the fields" — these 
are what the evening run reveals. 

"On the one hand are the trenches where men 
live in conditions which must resemble those of the 
cave men: dug into the earth, and with danger of 
death as a daily habit; on the other, within half an 



48 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

hour's walk, most of the comforts of civilization. 
We come down from the work of carrying hundreds 
of mangled men, and in the evening sit eating straw- 
berries and cake in a pretty drawing-room." 

"The wounded had a curiously unconcerned ap- 
pearance, as though having been hit already they 
are immune." 

"Our young heroes " Yes, they are all of 

that, fearless, and swift to act. But they are prac- 
tical heroes — good mechanicians, ready to lend a 
hand on any lowly job of washing a stretcher or 
shifting furniture. I like the rough-neck way of 
the American Ambulance. There has been a snob- 
bish attempt made to describe these young workers 
as belonging to our "best families," representing the 
"elite" of America. That is to miss the point of 
the work. It is democratic service. Work hard and 
you are a popular member of the community. This 
Lorraine section went to Verdun, and Robert Toms 
of Marion, Iowa, wrote me : 

"Everybody has the right spirit, and we are all 
working together. We are living the real army 
life — sleeping out of doors and eating in a barn." 

One of the Verdun sections was sent to Bar-le-Duc 
recently where a bombardment by fourteen German 
aeroplanes was under way. Forty persons were 
killed and 160 injured. The boys cruised around 
the streets during the overhead shelling of forty- 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 49 

five minutes, picking up the dead and wounded. 
Almost all the cars were hit by fragments of shell. 
This prompt aid under fire endeared the American 
Ambulance to the inhabitants of that town. Next 
day one of the drivers took his coat to a tailor for 
repair. The man refused to accept any pay from 
one who had helped his city. 

A few of us were sitting around quietly one day 
when a French sous-officer entered, in a condition 
of what seems to our inarticulate Northern stolidity 
as excitement, but what in reality is merely clear 
expression of warm emotion. He said: 

"The people of Bar-le-Duc are grateful for what 
the Americans have done. Your work was excellent, 
wonderful. We will not forget it." 

This work of the American Ambulance Field 
Service is the most brilliant, the most widely known 
of any we are doing in France. As we motored 
through Lorraine, Major Humbert, brother of the 
Commanding General of the Third Division, stopped 
three of us, Americans, and said he wished to tell 
us, as spokesman to our country, that the American 
Ambulance Service gave great satisfaction to the 
French Army. "It is courageous and useful. We 
thank you." 

A Flanders section was sent out, ten cars at first. 
They served at the Second Rattle of the Yser, when 
gas was used for the first time by the enemy. It is 



50 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

a flat country and they ran close to the battle-front. 
They were billeted at Elverdinghe till the village 
crumbled under shell fire. 

The work was in part "cleaning plugs and cylin- 
ders, tightening nuts and bolts, oiling and greasing, 
washing our little cars just as though they were a 
lot of dirty kiddies." The cars receive pet names 
of Susan, and Beatrice, and The Contagious Bus. 
The Contagious Bus, Car 82, driven by Hayden, car- 
ried 187 contagious cases between March 29 and 
May 12, and a total of 980 men, covering 2,084 kilo- 
meters. In one day 95 men were transported to the 
hospitals in that one car. 

"At 2.30 in the afternoon a call came from the 
'Trois Chemins' poste, and in answering it Day 
and Brown had a close call. While on the road to 
the poste, at one place in view of the German 
trenches, they were caught in a bombardment, seven 
shells striking within 100 yards of the machine. 
Two or three days later, Latimer halted his machine 
at the end of the road, and walked down to the poste 
with the 'Medecin Auxiliare.' Shrapnel began to 
break near them and they were forced to put in the 
next few minutes in a ditch. They were forced to 
lie down five times that morning in this ditch, half 
full of mud and water. The red-headed girls still 
continue to keep open their little store right near 
the church on the main street. Downs spent the 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 51 

night on the road where he had dropped out with a 
broken transmission. A fire caused by the heating 
apparatus broke out in Ned Townsend's car. It 
flamed out suddenly, and it was too late to save even 
his personal belongings." 

There are all kinds of interludes in the work. 
Here is a Christmas note, "Dec. 25. The section 
had its Christmas dinner at 5 o'clock. Kenyon plays 
the violin very well, and Day and Downs are at 
home with the piano. Toasts were drunk all the 
way from Theodore Roosevelt to The Folks at 
Home.' After dinner impromptu theatricals, Frank- 
lin and White's dance taking the cake." 

"Car wanted for Poste de Secours No. 1, 200 yards 
from trenches, eight kilometers from our post. The 
car rocks from shell holes. Watch for the round 
black spots." 

General Putz, commanding the Detachement 
d'Armee de Belgique, states: "In spite of the bom- 
bardment of Elverdinghe, of the roads leading to this 
village, and of the Ambulance itself, this evacuation 
has been effected night and day without interruption. 
I cannot too highly praise the courage and devotion 
shown by the personnel of the section." 

One of the men writes: "From 3 a.m. April 22 
until 7.30 p.m. April 26, five cars on duty. In 
those four days each man got seven hours' sleep, 
sitting at the wheel, or an hour on a hospital bed." 



52 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Of one sudden shell-flurry: "We stayed still for 
fifteen minutes, I smoking furiously, and the Eng- 
lish nurse singing. Little 'Khaki,' the squad's pet 
dog, lay shaking." 

Five days of continuous heavy work exhausted 
them, and half of the corps was sent to Dunkirk 
"en repos." On the day of their arrival shells came 
in from a distance of twenty-one miles, twenty shells 
at intervals of half an hour. They took a minute 
and a half to arrive. The French outposts at the 
German lines telephoned that one was on its way, 
and the sirens of Dunkirk, twenty-one miles away, 
blew a warning. This gave the inhabitants a minute 
in which to dive into their cellars. The American 
Ambulances were the only cars left in the town. On 
the sound of the siren the boys headed for the 
Grand Place, and, as soon as they saw the cloud of 
dust, they drove into it. 

As one of them describes it : 

"We spent the next two hours cruising slowly 
about the streets, waiting for the next shells to come, 
and then going to see if any one had been hit. I 
had three dead men and ten terribly wounded — 
soldiers, civilians, women. The next day I was glad 
to be off for the quiet front where things happen in 
the open, and women and children are not mur- 
dered." 



THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 53 

"Seven shells fell within a radius of 200 yards of 
the cars, with pieces of brick and hot splinters. " 

A French official said of the Dunkirk bombard- 
ment : 

"I was at most of the scenes, but always found 
one of your ambulances before me." 

A Moroccan lay grievously wounded in a Dun- 
kirk hospital. One of our boys sat down beside the 
cot. 

"Touchez le main," said the wounded man, feebly. 
He was lonely. 

The boys stayed with him for a time. The man 
was too far spent to talk, but every little while he 
said : 

"Touchez le main." 

Through the darkness of his pain, he knew that 
he had a companion there. The young foreigner at 
his side was a friend, and cared that he suffered. 
It is difficult to put in public print what one comes 
to know about these young men of ours, for they 
are giving something besides efficient driving. I 
have seen men like Bob Toms at work, and I know 
that every jolt of the road hurts them because it 
hurts their wounded soldier. 

A young millionaire who has been driving up in 
the Alsace district, remarked the other day : 

"I never used to do anything, but I won't be able 
to live like that after the war. The pleasantest 



54 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

thing that is going to happen to me when this thing 
is over will be to go to the telephone in New York 
and call up Francois. 

" That you, Francois? Come and let's have din- 
ner together and talk over the big fight.' 

"Francois is a Chasseur Alpin. I've been seeing 
him up on the mountain. Frangois is the second 
cook at the Knickerbocker Hotel, and the finest 
gentleman I ever knew." 




to" X 

<V g 4_, 



CG .5 



IV 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 

THE French have been massed at Verdun in 
the decisive battle of the war. So were 
the Americans. Our little group of ambu- 
lance drivers were called from the other points of 
the 350-mile line, and five sections of the American 
Ambulance Field Service and the Harjes and the 
Norton Corps work from ten up to twenty hours of 
the day bringing in their comrades, the French 
wounded. One hundred and twenty of our cars and 
1 20 of our boys in the field service were in the sector, 
under constant shell-fire. Several were grievously 
wounded. Others were touched. A dozen of the 
cars were shot up with shrapnel and slivers of 
explosive shell. 

Will Irwin and I went up with Piatt Andrew, 
head of the field service, to see the young Americans 
at work. We left Paris on July 1 in a motor car. 
Our chauffeur was Philibert, Eighth Duke of Cler- 
mont-Tonnerre, Fifth Prince of the name, Tenth 
Marquess of Cruzy and Vauvillars, Forty-fifth 

55 



56 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Count of the name, Sixteenth Viscount of Tallart, 
Twenty-first Baron of Clermont en Viennois, Ancien 
Pair de France, descendant of the Seigneur of Saint 
Geoire. For nine centuries his family has been 
famous. The Duke is a kindly, middle-aged aristo- 
crat, who is very helpful to the American Field 
Service. He takes the boys on visits to some one 
of his collection of chateaus. He drives Piatt 
Andrew on his tours of inspection. He is a gifted 
and furious driver, and on our dash from Paris to 
Verdun he burned up a couple of tires. It was a 
genial thing to see him, caked with dust on face and 
clothing, tinkering the wheel. To be served by one 
of the oldest families in Europe was a novel ex- 
perience for Irwin and me, though actually what the 
Duke was doing in his democratic way is being done 
almost universally by the "high-born" of France. 
Up through thousands of transports, thousands of 
horses and tens of thousands of men, we steered our 
course to Lovering Hill's section of the American 
Field Service. 

There on the hillside, to the west of Verdun, were 
the boys and their cars. It was daytime, so they 
were resting. All work is night work. They were 
muddy, unshaved, weary. A couple of baseball 
gloves were lying around. One of the boys was re- 
pairing a car that had collided with a tree. There 
was mud on all the cars, and blood on the inner side 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 57 

of one car. For ten nights they have been making 
one of the hottest ambulance runs of the war. 

It was on that run that William Notley Barber, 
of Toledo, Ohio, was shot through the back. The 
shell fragment tore a long, jagged rent in his khaki 
army coat, with a circle of blood around the rip, 
entered the back and lay against the lung and stom- 
ach. The car was shattered. The next man found 
him. The wrecked car still stood on the road with 
a dead man in it, the wounded soldier whom he was 
bringing back. We saw Barber at the field hospital. 
He had been operated on for the second time. He 
showed us the quarter inch of metal which the sur- 
geon had just taken out, the second piece to be re- 
moved. He has won the Medaille Militaire. 

This section needed no initiation. They had long 
served at Hartmannsweilerkopf in the Alsace fight- 
ing, and of their number Hall was killed. This ex- 
perience at Verdun is a continuation of the danger- 
ous, brilliant work they have carried on for sixteen 
months. These men are veterans in service, though 
youngsters in years. By their shredded cars and 
the blood they have spilled they have earned the 
right to be ranked next to soldiers of the line. 

They gave me the impression of having been 
through one of the great experiences of life. There 
was a tired but victorious sense they carried, of men 
that had done honest service. 



58 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

As we sat on the grass and looked out on a sky 
full of observation balloons and aeroplanes, a very 
good-looking young man walked up. Only one 
thing about his make-up was marred, and that was 
his nose — a streak of red ran across the bridge. 

"Shrapnel," he said, as he saw me looking. "And 
it seems a pity, too. I spent $600 on that nose, just 
before I came over here. They burned it, cauterized 
it, wired it, knifed it, and pronounced it a thorough 
job. And as soon as it was cleaned up, it came over 
here into powder and dust and got messed up by 
shrapnel. Now the big $600 job will have to be 
done over again." 

This young man is Waldo Pierce, the artist. It 
was he who once started on a trip to Europe with a 
friend, but didn't like the first meal, so jumped over- 
board and swam back. He sailed by the next boat, 
and arrived on the other side to find his friend in 
trouble for his disappearance. 

Through the side of Pierce's coat, just at the 
pocket, and just over the heart, I saw a bullet hole. 

"Pretty stagey, isn't it 4 ?" he explained. "If it 
had been a ragged, irregular hole, somewhere else, 
say at the elbow, it would have been all right. But 
this neat little hole just at the vital spot is conven- 
tional stuff. It looks like the barn door, and five 
yards away. 

"And this is worse yet," he added, as he took out 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 59 

from the inner breast pocket a brown leather wallet. 
Through one flap the same shrapnel bullet had pene- 
trated. Together, coat and wallet had saved this 
young man's life. 

"That's the sort of thing that wouldn't go any- 
where," Pierce went on. He is a Maine man, and 
has a pleasant drawl. 

Wheeler's car was shot through, the slatting 
ripped at the driver's place, the sides a mess. A man 
on his right and a man at his left were killed. The 
stuff passed over his head as he knelt before a tire. 
The boys have been playing in luck. A dozen fatali- 
ties were due them in the June drive at Verdun. 
This was the fiercest offensive of the four months, 
and they stood up to it. 

We were looking west, and as we looked an aero- 
plane burst into flames. As it fell, it left a trail of 
black smoke, funnel shaped, and always at the point 
of that funnel the bright spark, and at the heart of 
that spark a man burning to death. The spark de- 
scended rather slowly, with a spiraling movement, 
and trailing the heavy smoke. It burned brightly 
all the way to the horizon line, where it seemed to 
continue for a moment, like a setting sun on the 
earth's rim. Then it puffed out, and only the smoke 
in the sky was left. In another moment the light 
wind had shredded the smoke away. 

It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and we had been 



60 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

coming from Paris at full tilt to get to the Etat 
Major and report ourselves. So, after watering the 
car and shaking hands all around, we started off, 
and straightway the rear left tire went flat, and its 
successor went flat, and for the third time it went 
flat. So we crawled to a village at midnight, and 
laid by for repairs. 

At 3 a.m. we rose. There was no dressing to be 
done, as we had rested in our clothes. We ran out 
past the city of Verdun on the road going east to 
Fort de Tavannes. Wheat was ripening to the full 
crop in a hundred fields about us. All the birds were 
singing. The pleasant stir and fullness of summer 
were coming down the air. 

Then on a sudden the famous Tier de Barrage 
broke out — the deadly barrier of fire that crumbles 
a line of trenches as a child pokes in an ant hill: 
the fire that covers an advance and withers an enemy 
attack. Here was what I had been waiting for 
through twenty-one months of war. I had caught 
snatches of it at a dozen points along the line. I 
had eaten luncheon by a battery near Dixmude, but 
they were lazy, throwing a shell or two only for 
each course. But here, just before the sun came up, 
200 feet from us, a battery of twelve 75s fired con- 
tinuously for twenty minutes. Just over the hill 
another battery cleared its throat and spoke. In the 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 61 

fields beyond us other batteries played continuously. 
Some of the men put cotton in their ears. 

We ran through a devastated wood. The green 
forest has been raked by high explosive into dead 
stumps, and looks like a New Hampshire hillside 
when the match trust has finished with it. The road 
is a thing of mounds and pits, blown up and dug 
out by a four months' rain of heavy shells. The 
little American cars are like rabbits. They dip into 
an obus hole, bounce up again and spin on. They 
turn round on their own tails. They push their pert 
little noses up a hill, where the road is lined with 
famous heavy makes, stalled and wrecked. They 
refuse to stay out of service. 

We rode back through the partially destroyed city 
of Verdun, lying trapped and helpless in its hollow 
of hills. We drove through its streets, some of 
them a pile of stones and plaster, others almost un- 
touched, with charming bits of water view and green 
lawns and immaculate white fronts. The city re- 
minded me of the victim whom a professional hyp- 
notist displays in a shop window, where he leaves 
him lying motionless in the trance for exhibition pur- 
poses. 

Verdun lay seemingly dead inside the range of 
German fire. But once the guns are forced back the 
city will spring into life. 

Then we returned to the ambulance headquarters 



62 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

and in an open tent shared the excellent rations 
which the field service provides for its workers. We 
were sitting with the French lieutenant and discuss- 
ing the values of rhythm in prose when the boys 
shouted to us from the next field. An aeroplane was 
dipping over an anchored sausage-shaped observa- 
tion balloon. The aeroplane had marked its victim, 
which could not escape, as a bird darts for a worm. 
The balloon opened up into flame and fell through 
thirty seconds, burning with a dull red. 

The hours we had just spent of work and excite- 
ment seemed to me fairly crowded, but they were 
mild in the life of the field service. They pound 
away overtime and take ugly hazards and preserve 
a boy's humor. More young men of the same stuff 
are needed at once for this American Ambulance 
Field Service. The country is full of newly made 
college graduates, wondering what they can make 
of their lives. Here is the choicest service in fifty 
years offered to them. 

Even a jitney wears out. Bump it in the car- 
buretor enough times, rake it with shrapnel, and it 
begins to lose its first freshness. More full sections 
of cars should be given. The work is in charge of 
Piatt Andrew, who used to teach political economy 
in Harvard, was later Director of the Mint, Assist- 
ant Secretary of the Treasury and secretary of 
Senator Aldrich's Monetary Commission. 




A. Piatt Andrew, who, as Director, has raised the Ameri- 
can Ambulance Field Service from a small beginning to a 
powerful factor in rescue work. 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 63 

As soon as twilight fell we started on the nightly 
round. Here was Section 4 of the American Ambu- 
lance doing hot service for Hill 304 and Dead Man's 
Hill. It was on this ride that I saw the real Verdun, 
the center of the deadliest action since men learned 
how to kill. The real Verdun is the focused 
strength of all France, flowing up the main roads, 
trickling down the side roads and overflowing upon 
the fields. The real Verdun is fed and armed by the 
thousands of motor cars that bray their way from 
forty miles distant, by the network of tiny narrow 
gauge railways, and by the horses that fill the 
meadows and forests. 

Tiny trucks and trains are stretched through all 
the sector. They look like a child's railroad, the 
locomotive not more than four feet high. They 
brush along by the road, and wander through fields 
and get lost in woods. The story goes in the field 
service that one of these wee trains runs along on a 
hillside, and just back of it is a battery of 22o's 
which shoot straight across the tracks at a height of 
three feet. The little train comes chugging along 
full of ammunition. The artillery men yell "Atten- 
tion," and begin firing all together. The train waits 
till there seems to be a lull, and goes by under the 
muzzles. 

We were still far enough from the front to see 
this enginery of war as a spectacle. The flashing 



64 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

cars and bright winged aeroplanes, the immense con- 
course of horses, the vast orderly tumult, thousands 
of mixed items, separate things and men, all shaped 
by one will to a common purpose, all of it clothed 
in wonder, full of speed and color — this prodigious 
spectacle brought to me with irresistible appeal a 
memory of childhood. 

"What does it remind me of?" I kept saying to 
myself. Now I had it: 

When I was a very little boy I used to get up 
early on two mornings of the year: one was the 
Fourth of July and the other was the day the circus 
came to town. The circus came while it was yet 
dark in the summer morning, unloaded the animals, 
unpacked the snakes and freaks, and built its house 
from the ground up. Very swiftly the great tents 
were slung, and deftly the swinging trapezes were 
dropped. Ropes uncoiled into patterns. The three 
rings came full circle. Seats rose tier on tier. Then 
the same invisible will created a mile long parade 
down Main Street, gave two performances of two 
hours each, and packed up the circus, which disap- 
peared down the road before the Presbyterian church 
bell rang midnight. 

A man once said to me of a world famous gen- 
eral: "He is a great executive. He could run a 
circus on moving day." It was the perfect tribute. 
So I can give no clearer picture of what Petain and 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 65 

his five fingers — the generals of his staff — are accom- 
plishing than to say they are running one thousand 
circuses, and every day is moving day. 

Our little car was like a carriage dog in the skill 
with which it kept out of the way of traffic while 
traveling in the center of the road. Three-ton trucks 
pounded down upon it and the small cuss breezed 
round and came out the other side. The boys told 
me that one of our jitneys once pushed a huge camion 
down over a ravine, and went on innocent and un- 
concerned, and never discovered its work as a wrecker 
till next day. 

But soon we passed out of the zone of transports 
and into the shell-sprinkled area. We went through 
a deserted village that is shelled once or twice a 
day. There is nothing so dead as a place, lately in- 
habited, where killing goes on. There is the smell of 
tumbled masonry and moldering flesh, the stillness 
that waits for fresh horror. Just as we left the 
village, the road narrowed down like the neck of a 
bottle. It is so narrow that only one stream of 
traffic can flow through. By the boys of the field 
service this peculiarly dangerous village of Beth- 
lainville is known as "Bethlehem" — Bethlehem, 
because no wise men pass that way. 

The young man with me had been bending over 
his steering gear, a few days before, when a shrapnel 
ball cut through the seat at just the level of his 



66 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

head. If he had been sitting upright the bullet 
would have killed him. And another bullet went 
past the face of the boy with him. The American 
Field Service has had nothing but luck. 

"But don't publish my name," said my friend. 
"It might worry the folk at home." 

We rode on till we had gone eighteen miles. 

"Here is our station." 

I didn't know we were there. Our Poste de 
Secours was simply one more hole in the ground, an 
open mouth into an invisible interior — one more 
mole hole in honeycombed ground. 

We entered the cave, and something hit my face. 
It was the flap of sacking which hung there to pre- 
vent any light being seen. We walked a few steps, 
hand extended, till it felt the second flap. We 
stepped into a little round room, like the dome of an 
astronomical observatory. It was lit by lantern. 
Three stretcher bearers were sitting there, and two 
chaplains, one Protestant, one Roman Catholic. 
The Protestant was a short, energetic man in the 
early forties, with stubby black beard and excellent 
flow of English. The Roman Catholic, Cleret de 
Langavant, was white-haired, with a long white 
beard, a quite splendid old fellow with his courtesy 
and native dignity. These two men, the best of 
friends, live up there in the shelled district, where 
they can minister to the wounded as fast as they 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 67 

come in from the trenches. Of one group of thirty 
French stretcher bearers who have been bringing 
wounded from Dead Man's Hill to this tunnel, 
where the Americans pick them up, ten have been 
killed. 

We went out from the stuffy, overcrowded shelter 
and stood in the little communicating trench that 
led from the Red Cross room to the road. We were 
looking out on 500,000 men at war — not a man of 
them visible, but their machinery filling the air with 
color and sound. We were not allowed to smoke, 
for a flicker of light could draw fire. 

We were standing on the crest of a famous hill. 
We saw, close by, Hill 340 and Dead Man's Hill, 
two points of the fiercest of the Verdun fighting. It 
was the wounded from Dead Man's Hill for whom 
we waited. Night by night the Americans wait 
there within easy shell range. Sometimes the place 
is shelled vigorously. Other nights attention is 
switched to other points. 

"I shouldn't stand outside," suggested one of the 
stretcher bearers. "The other evening one of our 
men had his arm blown off while he was sitting at 
the mouth of the tunnel. He thought it was going 
to be a quiet evening." 

But the young American doctor liked fresh air. 

It was a wonderful night of stars, with a bell- 
like clarity to the mild air and little breeze stirring. 



68 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

A perfect night for flying. We heard the whirr of 
the passing wings — the scouts of the sky were out. 
Searchlights began to play. I counted eight at once, 
and more than twenty between the hills. Sometimes 
they ran up in parallel columns, banding the western 
heaven. Sometimes they located the night errant 
and played their streams on him at the one inter- 
secting point. Again the lights would each of them 
go off on a separate search, flicking up and down the 
dome of the sky and rippling over banks of thin 
white cloud. 

Star lights rose by rockets and hung suspended, 
gathering intensity of light till it seemed as if it hit 
my face, then slowly fell. The German starlights 
were swift and brilliant ; the French steady and long 
continuing. 

"No good, the Bodies' lights," said a voice out of 
the tunnel. A French stretcher bearer had just 
joined us. 

Other rockets discharged a dozen balls at once, 
sometimes red, sometimes green. Then the pattern 
lights began to play — the lights which signal direc- 
tions for artillery fire. They zigzagged like a snake 
and again made geometrical figures. Some of the 
fifty guns, nested behind us, fired rapidly for five 
minutes and then knocked off for a smoke. From 
the direction of Hill 304 heavy guns, perhaps 22o's, 
thundered briefly. We could hear the drop of large 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 69 

shells in the distance. The Germans threw a few 
shells in the direction of the village through which 
we had driven, a few toward the battery back of 
us. We could hear the whistle of our shells travel- 
ing west and of their shells coming east. To stand 
midway between fires is to be in a safe and yet 
stimulating situation. From the gently sloping, 
innocent hillocks all about us tons of metal passed 
high over our heads into the lines. If only one shell 
in every fifty found its man, as the gossip of the 
front has it, the slaughter was thorough. 

"It is a quiet evening," said my friend. 

It was as if we were in the center of a vast cavity ; 
there were no buildings, no trees, nothing but dis- 
tance, and the distance filled with fireworks. I once 
saw Brooklyn Bridge garlanded with fireworks. It 
seemed to me a great affair. We spoke of it for days 
afterward. But here in front of us were twenty 
miles of exploding lights, a continuous performance 
for four months. With our heads thrust over the 
tunnel edge, we stood there for four hours. The 
night, the play of lights, the naked hill top, left 
us with a sense of something vast and lonely. 

The Protestant clergyman came and said: "Let 
us go across the road to my abri." 

He stumbled down two steps cut in clay and bent 
over to enter the earth cave. "I will lead you," he 
said, taking me by the arm. 



70 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

"Wait while I close the door," he said; "we must 
not show any light." 

When the cave was securely closed in he flashed 
a pocket electric. We were in a room scooped out of 
the earth. The roof was so low that my casque 
struck it. A cot filled a third of the space. The 
available standing room was three feet by six feet. 

"You will forgive me for asking it," he went on, 
"but please use your pocket lamp; mine is getting 
low and I am far away from supplies. We can get 
nothing up here." 

My friend handed over his lamp. The clergyman 
flashed it on a photograph pinned against a plank 
of wood. 

"My wife," he said; "she is an American girl from 
Bensonhurst, Long Island. And that is my child." 

He turned the light around the room. There 
were pages of pictures from the London Daily Mail 
and the New York Tribune. One was a picture of 
German soldiers in a church, drinking by the altar. 

"I call this my New York corner," he explained, 
"and this is my visiting card." From a pile he lifted 
a one-page printed notice, which read: 

"Declaration Religeuse. 

"I, the undersigned, belong to the Protestant 
religion. In consequence and conforming to the law 
of 1905, this is my formal wish: In case of sickness 
or accident, I wish the visit of a Protestant pastor 



THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 71 

and the succor of his ministry whether I am under- 
going treatment at a hospital or elsewhere; in case 
of death I wish to be buried with the assistance of a 
Protestant pastor and the rites of that Church." 

Space is left for the soldier to sign his name. The 
little circular is devised by this chaplain, Pastor 
, chaplain of the Division. 

At 2 o'clock in the morning we were ordered to 
load our car with the wounded, one "lying case," 
three "sitting cases." We discharged them at the 
hospital, and tumbled into the tent at Ippecourt at 
4 o'clock. 



AMERICAN relief work in France has many 
agencies and activities. I have given illus- 
trations of it, but these are only admirable 
bits among a host of equals. I have told of the 
American Field Service. Other sections of young 
Americans have been at work in the hottest corners 
of the battle front. The Harjes Formation and 
the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, 
known as the Norton Corps, have made a name for 
daring and useful work with their one hundred cars 
on the firing line. What the Field Service has 
done, they too have done and suffered. It was with 
a glow of pride that I read the name of my Yale 
classmate, W. P. Clyde, junior, of the Norton Am- 
bulance, cited in an order of the day, and made the 
recipient of the French War Cross. The command- 
ing general wrote of him: 

"Volunteer for a perilous mission, he acquitted 
himself with a cool courage under a heavy and con- 
tinuous fire. He has given, in the course of the 

72.' 



"FRIENDS OF FRANCE" 73 

campaign, numerous proofs of his indifference to 
danger and his spirit of self-sacrifice." 

I have shown the contribution of scientific skill 
and mechanical ingenuity which Americans have 
made in hospital and ambulance work. There re- 
mains a work in which our other American charac- 
teristic of executive ability is shown. Organization 
is the merit of the American Relief Clearing House. 
When the war broke out, American gifts tumbled 
into Paris, addressed and unaddressed. There was 
a tangle and muddle of generosity. The American 
Relief Clearing House was formed to meet this need. 
It centralizes and controls the receipt of relief from 
America intended for France and her Allies. It col- 
lects fresh accurate information on ravaged districts 
and suffering people. It prevents waste and over- 
lapping and duplication. It obtains free transporta- 
tion across the ocean for all gifts, free entry through 
the French customs, and free transportation on all 
the French railways. It forwards the gifts to the 
particular point, when it is specified. It distributes 
unmarked supplies to places of need. It receives 
money and purchases supplies. It has 114 persons 
giving all their time to its work. It has issued 
45,000 personally signed letters telling of the work. 
It employs ten auto trucks in handling goods. It has 
concentrated time, effort and gifts. It has obtained 
and spread information of the needs of the Allies. 



74 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

It has been efficient in creating relationship between 
the donor in America and the recipient in France, 
and in increasing good will between the nations. 
I do not write of the Clearing House from the out- 
side, but from a long experience. For many months 
my wife has given all her time to making known the 
work of Miss Fyfe who manages the work of relief 
for civilians, their transportation, and conducts a 
refugee house, and a Maternity Hospital in the 
little strip of Belgium which is still unenslaved. 
Little local committees, such as Miss Rider's in Nor- 
walk, in Cedar Rapids, in Montclair, and in Doug- 
laston, L. I., have been formed, and 36 boxes of 
material, and over $1,500 in money, have been 
given. Those supplies the Clearing House has 
brought from New York to La Panne, Belgium, free 
of charge, promptly, with no damage and no losses. 
What the Clearing House has done for this humble 
effort, it has done for 60,000 other consignments, 
and for more than a million dollars of money. It 
has distributed supplies to 2,500 hospitals and 200 
relief organizations in France. It has sent goods 
to Belgium, Salonica, to the sick French prisoners in 
Switzerland. It dispatched the ship Menhir for the 
relief of Serbian refugees. It has installed a com- 
plete hospital, with 200 beds and a radiograph out- 
fit. The cases which it transports contain gauze, 
cotton, bandages, hospital clothing, surgical instru- 



"FRIENDS OF FRANCE" 75 

ments, garments, underwear, boots, socks. The 
names of the men who have administered this ex- 
cellent organization in Paris are H. O. Beatty, 
Charles R. Scott, Randolph Mordecai, James R. 
Barbour, and Walter Abbott. 

After the claims of immediate dramatic suffering, 
comes the great mute community of the French peo- 
ple, whose life and work have been blighted. And 
for one section of that community the Association 
of "Les Amis des Artistes" has been formed. "To 
preserve French art from the deadly effects of the 
war, which creates conditions so unfavorable to the 
production of masterpieces of painting, sculpture, 
architecture, decorative arts, engraving," is the ob- 
ject of this society. The members see that other 
forms of activity will swiftly revive after the war. 
"The invaded districts will be rebuilt, business will 
flourish. But art will have a hard and prolonged 
struggle." The society purchases from its funds the 
works of men of talent whom the war has robbed of 
means of support. These paintings, statuary, en- 
gravings, so acquired, are annually divided among 
the members. The purchase is made by a committee 
composed of distinguished artists, critics and con- 
noisseurs, representing the three great French salons 
and the various art tendencies of the modern move- 
ment. The Honorary Committee includes Bakst, 
Hanotaux, Maeterlinck, Rodin and Raemaekers. 



76 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Americans who are aiding are Mrs. Mark Baldwin, 
Mrs. Paul Gans, Walter Gay, Laurence V. Benet, 
and Percy Peixotto. 

The new American fund of the "Guthrie Com- 
mittee" for the relief of the orphans of war has been 
recently announced. It is planned to raise many 
millions of dollars for this object. 

Children, artists, invalid soldiers, refugees — there 
is a various and immense suffering in France at this 
moment, and no American can afford to be neutral 
in the presence of that need. The sense of the sharp 
individual disturbance and of the mass of misery 
came to me one day when I visited the Maison 
Blanche. We entered the open air corridor, where 
a group of thirty men rose to salute our party. My 
eye picked up a young man, whose face carried an 
expression of gentleness. 

"Go and bring the War Minister your work," 
said the Major who was conducting us. 

A little chattering sound came from the lips of 
the boy. It sounded like the note of a bird, a faint 
twittering, making the sound of "Wheet-Wheet" — 
twice repeated each half minute. Then began the 
strangest walk I have ever seen. His legs thrust 
out in unexpected directions, his arms bobbed, his 
whole body trembled. Sometimes he sank partly to 
the ground. His progress was slow, because he was 
spilling his vitality in these motions. And all the 



"FRIENDS OF FRANCE" 77 

time, the low chirrup came from his lips. More 
laborious and cruel than the price paid by the vic- 
tims of vice was this walk of one who had served 
his country. 

And yet nothing in the indignity that had been 
done to his body could rob him of that sweetness of 
expression. 

"A shell exploded directly in front of him," ex- 
plained the doctor, "the sudden shock broke his nerv- 
ous system, and gave him what is practically a case 
of locomotor ataxia. He trembles continuously in 
every part. It forces out the little cry. The effect 
of that shock is distributed through his entire body. 
That is what gives hope for his recovery. If the 
thing had centered in any one function, he would 
be a hopeless case. But it is all diffused. When 
the war ends many of these men who are nerve- 
shattered, will recover, we believe. As long as the 
war lasts, they live it, they carry a sense of respon- 
sibility, with the horror that goes with it. But when 
they know the shelling is over for ever they will 
grow better." 

In a few minutes the young soldier returned carry- 
ing two baskets. The one thing that is saving that 
man from going crazy is his basket making. Very 
patiently and skillfully his shaking hands weave 
close-knit little baskets. Some of them were open 
trays for household knick-knacks. Others were 



78 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

worked out into true art shapes of vase. I shan't 
forget him as he stood there trembling, the little 
reed baskets rocking in his hands, but those baskets 
themselves revealing not a trace of his infirmity. 
Only his nervous system was broken. But his will 
to work, his sweet enduring spirit, were the will and 
the heart of France. 

The War Minister, in whose hands rests the health 
of four million soldiers, is as painstaking, as tender 
as a nurse. Fifteen minutes he gave that man — 
fifteen minutes of encouragement. The rest of 
France waited, while this one little twitching rep- 
resentative of his race received what was due from 
the head of the nation to the humblest sufferer. Do 
I need to say that the soldier was bought out? Pro- 
fessor Mark Baldwin and Bernard Shoninger held 
an extempore auction against each other. But one 
basket they could not buy and that was the tray the 
man had woven for his wife. He was proud to 
show it, but money could not get it. And he was a 
thrifty man at that. For, as soon as he had received 
his handful of five-franc notes, he went to his room, 
where he sleeps alone so that his twittering will not 
disturb the other men, and hid the money in his kit. 
Something more for his wife to go with the basket. 

Clearing house of the suffering of France, the 
Maison Blanche is the place where the mutilated of 
the Grand Army come. As quickly as they are dis- 



"FRIENDS OF FRANCE" 79 

charged from hospital, they are sent to this Maison 
Blanche, while completing their convalescence, be- 
fore they return to their homes. It is here that arms, 
legs, stumps, hands and the apparatus that operates 
these members, are fitted to them. They try out the 
new device. It is to them like a foot asleep to a 
whole man; a something numb and strange out 
beyond the responses of the nervous system. It be- 
haves queerly. It requires much testing to make it 
articulate naturally. 

Through the recreation hall, where plays and mo- 
tion pictures have made gay evenings in time past 
before the war, file the slow streams of the crippled, 
backwash of the slaughter to the North. To the 
soldiers it is a matter of routine, one more item in 
the long sacrifice. They fit on the member and 
test it in a businesslike way, with no sentimentaliz- 
ing. Too many are there in the room, and other 
hundreds on the pleasant sunny lawns, in like case, 
for the individual to feel himself the lonely victim. 
There are no jests — the war has gone too far for 
superficial gayety — and there is no hint of despair, 
for France is being saved. The crippled man is 
sober and long-enduring. 

There in that room I saw the war as I have not 
seen it in five months of active service at the front. 
For yonder on the Yser we had the dramatic reliefs 
of sudden bombardment, and flashing aeroplanes. 



80 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

But here were only broken men. There were no 
whole men at all in the long Salle. The spirit of the 
men was all that it ever was. But the body could 
no longer respond. They stood in long line, stripped 
to the waist or with leg bare waiting their turn 
with the doctor and the apparatus expert. There is 
the look of an automaton to an artificial limb, as if 
the men in their troubled motions were marionettes. 
And then the imagination, abnormally stimulated by 
so much suffering, plays other tricks. And it seemed 
to me as if one were looking in at the window of 
one of those shameful "Halls of Anatomy" in a city 
slum, where life-size figures lie exposed with gro- 
tesque wounds on the wax flesh. But here was the 
crackle of the leather straps, and the snapping of 
the spring at the knee and elbow-joint of the mech- 
anism, and the slow moving up and filing past of 
the line, as man after man was tested for flexibility. 
Here is the army of France — here is the whole vast 
problem flowing through one door and gathered in 
one room. 

American money is helping to reeducate these 
broken men, teaching them trades. There at the 
Maison Blanche, our fellow-countrymen have al- 
ready trained 563 men, and at the Grand Palais 
257. As I write this, 701 maimed men are still in 
course of being trained, and the number in the agri- 
cultural school has grown to 90. Altogether 2,000 



"FRIENDS OF FRANCE'' 81 

maimed soldiers have been trained through American 
help. Most of the money for this work has been 
raised by the "American Committee for Training in 
Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France," of 
which Mrs. Edmund Lincoln Baylies is Chairman. 
The president of the society in France in control 
of this work is B. J. Shoninger, the former president 
of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris. 

Like England in the battle line, we are only at 
the beginning of our effort. In spots and patches 
we have responded well. Many are giving all they 
can. The thirty-five million dollars in money which 
we have collected for all causes is excellent. 
(Though England has given more than that to Bel- 
gium alone, in addition to financing the war and 
caring for her own multitude of sufferers.) America 
has made gifts in goods to the amount of sixty mil- 
lion dollars. Of local relief committees working for 
France we have over two thousand. There are about 
forty-five thousand Americans devoting their full 
time to the service of France as soldiers, drivers, 
fliers, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and executive offi- 
cers. There are many thousands in the United 
States who are using a portion of their strength and 
leisure to raise money and supplies. As Sydney 
Brooks said to me : 

"Those Americans who believe in our cause are 
more Pro-Ally than the Allies." 



82 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

A group of Americans among our millions are 
aware that Washington wrote: 

"All citizens of the United States should be in- 
spired with unchangeable gratitude to France." 



Note: For an account of the work of Mrs. Wharton see page szt. 



VI 



THE SAVING REMNANT 



I WISH to show in this book three expressions of 
nationality. I seek to show the fire and vigor 
of German nationality, and how that force has 
been misdirected by the handful of imperialistic 
militarists in control. There has been no instance 
of a noble force so diverted since the days of the 
Inquisition, when the vast instinctive power of re- 
ligion was used by a clever organization to torture 
and kill. Every instinctive element in our being is 
at times turned awry. Nationalism suffers just as 
sex love suffers from the perversions of evil insti- 
tutions. But the abuse of instinct is no argument 
for cutting loose from that vital source and seeking 
to live by intellectual theories, emptied of warm 
emotional impulse. The remedy is in applying the 
intellect as a guide and corrective, not in treating in- 
stinct as an enemy. The nationalism of the German 
people will yet vindicate itself and swing true to 
freedom and justice. 

I try to reveal the nationality of France, in the 

83 



84 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

love of the peasant for the soil of his Patrie, for 
the house where he was born, and for the sunlight 
and the equality of his beautiful country. I have 
shown that there can be no peace as long as other 
men with other customs invade that soil, burn those 
homes, and impose their alien ideas. 

I have told of what the American tradition of 
nationality has driven our men and women and our 
boys to do in France. They see the fight of France 
as our fight, just as France saw the American Revo- 
lution as her struggle. None of this work was done 
in vague humanitarianism. These men and women 
and boys are giving of their best for a definite aim. 
They are giving it to the American cause in France. 
France is defending the things that used to be dear 
to us, and our fellow-countrymen who are of the 
historic American tradition are standing at her side. 

In recent years, our editors and politicians have 
been busy in destroying our historic tradition and 
creating a new tradition, by means of which we are 
to obtain results without paying the price. Neu- 
trality is the method, and peace and prosperity are 
the rewards. I have collected many expressions of 
this new conception of Americanism. One will 
suffice. 

Martin H. Glynn, temporary chairman of the 
National Democratic Convention, in renominating 
Woodrow Wilson for president, said : 



THE SAVING REMNANT 85 

"Neutrality is America's contribution to the laws 
of the world. . . . The policy of neutrality is as 
truly American as the American flag. . . . The 
genius of this country is for peace. Compared with 
the blood-smeared pages of Europe, our records are 
almost immaculate. To-day prosperity shines from 
blazing furnaces and glowing forges. Never was 
there as much money in our vaults as to-day. . . . 
When the history of these days comes to be written, 
one name will shine in golden splendor upon the 
page that is blackened with the tale of Europe's 
war, one name will represent the triumph of Ameri- 
can principles over the hosts of darkness and of 
death. It will be the name of the patriot who has 
implanted his country's flag on the highest peak to 
which humanity has yet aspired : the name of Wood- 
row Wilson." 

It was in protest against this neutrality, this rev- 
eling in fat money vaults, this assumption that pros- 
perity is greater than sacrifice, that these young men 
of whom I have told have gone out to be wounded 
and to die. This mockery of the "blackened page" 
and "blood-smeared pages" of Europe has stung 
many thousands of Americans into action. The 
record of their service is a protest against such gloat- 
ing. These fighters and rescuers and workers would 
not have served Germany with an equal zest. Neu- 
trality between France and Germany is impossible 



86 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

to them. Those who fail to see the difference be- 
tween France and Germany in this war are not of 
our historic American tradition. 

Meanwhile our friends at home, very sincere and 
gifted men, but mistaken, I believe, in their attitude 
toward nationality, are summoning America to an 
artistic rebirth, so that "the new forces in our arts 
may advance." They write: "The soldier falls 
under the compulsion of the herd-instinct and is de- 
voted by his passion to a vision out of which de- 
struction and death are wrought." To one who has 
heard the guns of Verdun, this piping is somewhat 
scrannel. Art is not something that exists in a 
vacuum beyond space and time, and good and evil. 
Art is the expression of a belief in life, and that 
belief takes varying forms, according to the place 
and age in which it falls. It may be the expression 
of a surge of national feeling, as in Russian music. 
It may be the response to a rediscovery of ancient 
beauty, as in the Renaissance. It may be the quick- 
ening received from fresh discoveries of territory and 
strange horizons, such as touched the Elizabethans. 
In America we have long tried by artificial stimu- 
lants to revive art. We have omitted the one sure 
way, which is a deep nationality, achieved by sac- 
rifice, a reassertion of national idealism. Out of 
that soil will spring worthy growths, which the thin 
surface of modern fashionable cosmopolitanism can 



THE SAVING REMNANT 87 

never nourish. The sense of the true America has 
laid hold of these young men of ours in France. 
By living well they create the conditions of art. The 
things they do underlie all great expression. Al- 
ready they are writing with a tone and accent which 
have long gone unheard in our America. 

My lot has cast me with young men at their 
heroic moment. For the first months of the war it 
was with Belgian boys, later with French sailors, 
finally with these young Americans. They have 
made me impatient of our modern cosmopolitan 
American who, in the words of Dostoievski, "Can be 
carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet, by 
noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves, if 
they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be 
paid for." 

The reason why pacifism is ineffectual is because 
it is an intellectual theory, which does not build on 
instinct. A man's love of his home and his nation 
is an instinctive thing, full of rich emotional values 
and moving with the vital current of life itself. 
Our pacifists would clear their thinking if they came 
under shell-fire. All that is sound in modern radical 
thought has been strengthened by this war. The 
democratic movement in England has become an 
overwhelming force. But the unsound elements in 
radical thought, those elements introduced by intel- 
lectual theorists who scheme a world distasteful to 



88 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

average human nature, have been burned away in 
the fire. One of those unsound elements was the 
theory of pacifism and cosmopolitanism. Many 
Americans have no belief in the idea of our country. 
They are busy with the mechanics of life. Any per- 
son who is not "getting results" is felt by them to 
be ineffectual. In that absorption in material gain, 
they have laid hold of a doctrine which would jus- 
tify them in their indifference to profounder values. 
It is so that we have weakened our sense of nation- 
ality. 

The nation is a natural "biological group," whose 
members have an "instinctive liking" for each other 
and "act with a common purpose." The instinctive 
liking is created by common customs and a shared 
experience. This experience, expressed in song and 
legislative enactment and legend, becomes known as 
the national tradition, and is passed on from gen- 
eration to generation in household heroes, such as 
Lincoln, and famous phrases such as "Government 
of the people." That instinctive liking, created by 
the contacts of a common purpose and rooted in a 
loved tradition, is gradually being weakened in our 
people by importations of aliens, who have not 
shared in a common experience, and have not in- 
herited our tradition. It is not possible to blend 
diverse races into a nation, when members of one race 
plot against our institutions in the interests of a 



THE SAVING REMNANT 89 

European State, and members of another race ex- 
tract wealth from our industry and carry it home 
to their own people. Instinctive liking is not so 
nourished. A common purpose is not manifested in 
that way. We have not touched the imagination 
of these newcomers. It requires something more 
than "big chances" to lay hold of the instinctive life 
of peasants. Our lax nationalism never reaches the 
hidden elements of their emotion to make them one 
in the deeper life of the State. Skyscrapers and 
hustling and easy money are excellent things, but 
not enough to call out loyalty and allegiance. 

These changing conditions of our growth have 
blotted out from memory the old historic experience 
and substituted a fresher, more recent, experience. 
Forty years of peace and commercial prosperity have 
created a new American tradition, breeding its own 
catch words and philosophy. The change has come 
so quietly, and yet so completely, that Americans 
to-day are largely unaware that they are speaking 
and acting from different motives, impulses and de- 
sires than those of the men who created and estab- 
lished the nation. The types of our national heroes 
have changed. We have substituted captains of 
industry for pioneers, and smart men for creative 
men. Our popular phrases express the new current 
of ideas. "Making good," "neutrality," "punch," 
"peace and prosperity": these stir our emotional 



go OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

centers. We used to be shaken and moved when 
the spirit of a Kossuth or Garibaldi spoke to us. 
But to-day we receive the appeal of Cardinal 
Mercier, and are unmoved. We no longer know the 
great accent when we hear it. 

So we must look to the young to save us. Henry 
Farnsworth was a Boston man, twenty-five years 
old. He died near Givenchy, fighting for France. 

"I want to fight for France," he had said, "as the 
French once fought for us." 

Our American workers are aiding France because 
she defends our tradition, which is also hers, a tradi- 
tion of freedom and justice, practiced in equality. 
In her version of it, there are elements of intellectual 
grace, a charm, a profundity of feeling expressed 
with a light touch, bits of "glory," clothed in flow- 
ing purple, which are peculiar to the Latin tempera- 
ment. But the ground plan is the same. Our doc- 
tors and nurses of the American Hospital, our work- 
ers in the hostels and the Clearing House, our boys 
in the American Field Service, are not alone saving 
the lives of broken men of a friendly people. They 
are restoring American nationality. 



SECTION II 
WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL 



neutrality: an interpretation of the 
middle west 

"The great interior region bounded east by the Alle- 
ghanies, north by the British Dominions, west by the 
Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the 
culture of corn and cotton meets . . . will have fifty 
millions of people within fifty years, if not prevented by 
any political folly or mistake. It contains more than 
one-third of the country owned by the United States — 
certainly more than one million of square miles. A glance 
at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the 
great body of the republic. The other parts are but mar- 
ginal borders to it." 

{Lincoln's Message to Congress, Dec. i, 1862.) 

THE war and the election together have re- 
vealed a growing separation between the 
ideas of the East and those of the West. 
This separation is largely the fault of the East, 
which prefers to do its thinking in terms of its own 
industrial welfare. The life of the West is a 
healthier life. There is better balance between in- 
dustry and agriculture, more recognition of the value 
.of social equality, more open-mindedness to new 
ideas, greater readiness to put them into practice. 

93 



94 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

The East has been slow to recognize this moral 
leadership of the newer country. It has greeted the 
men and their ideas with caustic humor and some- 
times with an almost malignant bitterness. This 
has not weakened the men nor crushed their ideas, 
but it has lessened good will. It has led the West 
to distrust a policy which has the endorsement of the 
East. 

The German Kaiser said to a distinguished French- 
man whom I know : 

"America once divided between North and South. 
It would not be impossible now to separate America, 
the East from the West." 

It is time for the East to waken itself from its 
selfish sleep, and bend its mind to an understand- 
ing of the American community. In the matter of 
foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but 
in order to make its ideas prevail it will have to 
work by sympathetic cooperation. It will have to 
prove that its notion of foreign policy is not based 
on self-interest, but is a wise program for the Ameri- 
can nation. 

I have shown that a section of America of the 
Civil War traditions is intensely Pro-Ally, and has 
proved it in speech and action. The new America, 
spreading out over the immense areas of the Middle 
West, is neutral. It is neutral because it does not 
know the facts. I am sometimes told in Europe 



NEUTRALITY 95 

that it is the chink of our money that has made my 
country deaf. But our neutral people are our ear- 
nest Middle Westerners, hard-working and humani- 
tarian. The Middle West has not given money, and 
it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and it 
is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of 
the Allied methods of conducting the war. In Eng- 
land and France, there has been an unconscious dis- 
regard of neutral opinion, an indifference in the 
treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness 
to use the methods of a democracy in appealing to a 
democracy. A Government report, issued by a bel- 
ligerent power, has little effect on a community 
three thousand miles away. But the first-hand ac- 
counts, sent by its own writers, who are known to 
be accurate and impartial, have wide effect. It is 
unfortunate that through the first two years of the 
war, more news was given to American journalists 
by Germany than by England and France. 

There is need that some one should speak the 
truth about the foreign policy of the Allies. For 
that foreign policy has been a failure in its effect on 
neutrals. The successful prosecution of a war in- 
volves three relationships: 

(1) The enemy. 

(2) The Allies. 

(3) The Neutrals. 

The first two relationships have long been real- 



96 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

ized. The third — that of relationship toward neu- 
trals — has never been realized. It is not fully real- 
ized to-day. The failure to realize it led America 
and England into the fight of 1812. It led to the 
Mason and Slidell case between England and Amer- 
ica in the Civil War. The importance of winning 
neutral good will and public opinion is not, even to- 
day, included in the forefront of the national effort. 
It is still spoken of as a minor matter of giving 
"penny-a-liner" journalists "interviews." England 
has steered her way through diplomatic difficulties 
with neutral governments. But that is only one- 
half the actual problem of a foreign policy. The 
other half is to win the public opinion of the neu- 
tral people, because there is no such thing finally as 
neutrality.* Public opinion turns either Pro or 

* Mazzini's idea of neutrality was this: 

"A law of Solon decreed that those who in an insurrection 
abstained from taking part on one side or the other should be 
degraded. It was a just and holy law, founded on the belief — 
then instinctive in the heart of Solon, but now comprehended and 
expressed in a thousand formulas — in the solidarity of mankind. 
It would be just now more than ever. What! you are in the 
midst of the uprising, not of a town, but of the whole human 
race; you see brute force on the one side, and right on the other 
. . . whole nations are struggling under oppression . . . men die 
in hundreds, by thousands, fighting for or against an idea. This 
idea is either good or evil ; and you continue to call yourselves 
men and Christians, you claim the right of remaining neutral? 
You cannot do so without moral degradation. Neutrality — that 
is to say, indifference between good and evil, the just and the 
unjust, liberty and oppression — is simply Atheism." 



NEUTRALITY 97 

Anti, in the end. At present about thirty per cent of 
American public opinion is Pro-Ally. Ten per cent 
is anti-British, ten per cent anti-Russian, ten per cent 
Pro-German, and forty per cent neutral. The final 
weight will rest in whichever cause wins the forty 
per cent neutral element. That element is con- 
tained in the Middle West. The failure in dealing 
with America has been the failure to see that we 
needed facts, if we were to come to a decision. Our 
only way of getting facts is through the representa- 
tives whom we send over. 

A clear proof that the cause of the Allies has not 
touched America except on the Atlantic Seaboard 
lies in the exact number of men from the Eastern 
Universities who have come across to help France, 
as compared with the number from the Middle West- 
ern institutions of learning. For instance, in the 
American Field Ambulance Service Harvard has 98 
men, Princeton, 28, Yale 27, Columbia 9, Dart- 
mouth 8. These are Eastern institutions. From the 
Middle West, with the exception of the University 
of Michigan, which has sent several, there is occa- 
sionally one man from a college. The official report 
up to the beginning of 1916 shows not a man from 
what many consider the leading University of Amer- 
ica, the State University of Wisconsin, and less than 
six from the entire Middle West. There is no need 



98 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

of elaborating the point. The Middle West has 
not been allowed to know the facts. 

Because my wife told her friends in Cedar Rapids, 
Iowa, the facts of the war, three men have come four 
thousand miles to help France. One is Robert Toms, 
General Manager of the Marion Water Works, one 
is Dr. Cogswell, a successful physician, one is Verne 
Marshall, Editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Each 
man of the three is a successful worker, and gave 
up his job. These three men are as significant as 
the 98 college boys from Harvard. 

What took place in that little Iowa group will 
take place throughout the whole vast Middle West- 
ern territory, when the Allies are willing to use the 
only methods that avail in a modern democracy — 
namely, the use of public opinion, publicity, and the 
periodicals, — by granting facilities for information 
to the representatives of a democracy when they come 
desiring to know the truth. Constantly, one is met 
in London and Paris when seeking information on 
German atrocities, German frightfulness, German 
methods : 

"But surely your people know all that." 

How can they know it? Our newspaper men 
have rarely been permitted access to the facts by the 
Allies. But to every phase of the war they have 
been personally conducted by the German General 
Staff. It has been as much as our liberty was worth, 



NEUTRALITY 99 

and once or twice almost as much as our life was 
worth, to endeavor to build up the Pro-Ally case, so 
constant have been the obstacles placed in our way. 
Much of the interesting war news, most of the ar- 
resting interviews, have come from the German side. 
The German General Staff has shown an understand- 
ing of American psychology, a flexibility in hand- 
ling public opinion. The best "stories" have often 
come out of Germany, given to American correspond- 
ents. Their public men and their officers, includ- 
ing Generals, have unbent, and stated their case. An 
American writer, going to Germany, has received 
every aid in gathering his material. A writer, with 
the Allies, is constantly harassed. This is a novel 
experience to any American journalist whose status 
at home is equal to that of the public and profes- 
sional men, whose work he makes known and aids. 
My own belief for the first twenty-two months of 
work in obtaining information and passing it on to 
my countrymen was that such effort in their behalf 
was not desired by France and England, that their 
officials and public men would be better pleased if 
we ceased to annoy them. I was thoroughly dis- 
couraged by the experience, so slight was the offi- 
cial interest over here in having America know the 
truth. 

This foreign policy, which dickers with the State 
Department, but neglects the people, is a survival 



ioo OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

of the Tory tradition. One of the ablest interpre- 
ters of that tradition calls such a foreign policy — 
"the preference for negotiating with governments 
rather than with peoples." But the foreign policy 
of the United States is created by public opinion. 
Negotiation with the State Department leaves the 
people, who are the creators of policy, cold and neu- 
tral, or heated and hostile, because uninformed. If 
the Allied Governments had released facts to the 
representatives of American public opinion, our for- 
eign policy of the last two years might have been 
more firm and enlightened, instead of hesitant and 
cloudy. As a people we have made no moral con- 
tribution to the present struggle, because in part 
we did not have the fact-basis and the intellectual 
material on which to work. 

If a democracy, like England, is too proud to 
present its case to a sister democracy, then at that 
point it is not a democracy. If it gives as excuse 
(and this is the excuse which officials give) that the 
military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Al- 
lies are more dominated by their military than Ger- 
many. Of course the real reason is neither of these. 
The real reason is that England and France are un- 
aware of the situation in our Middle West. 

The Middle West is a hard-working, idealistic, 
"uncommercialized" body of citizens, who create our 
national policy. It has some of the best universi- 



NEUTRALITY 101 

ties in America — places of democratic education, 
reaching every group of citizen in the State, and pro- 
foundly influential on State policy. Such Univer- 
sities as the State Universities of Wisconsin 
and Michigan are closely related to the life of their 
community, whereas Yale University could not 
carry a local election in New Haven. What 
the late Professor Sumner (of Yale) thought, was 
of little weight at the Capitol House at Hart- 
ford, Conn. What John R. Commons (Pro- 
fessor at the State University of Wisconsin) thinks, 
has become State law. The Middle West has put 
into execution commission government in over 200 
of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow 
of municipal graft. It practices city-planning. 
Many of its towns are models. Our sane radical 
movements in the direction of equality are Middle- 
Western movements. To curse this section as money- 
grubbing, uninspired, and to praise the Harvard- 
Boston Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories, 
and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope 
of our country, is to twist values. Both elements 
are excellent and necessary. Out of their chemical 
compounding will come the America of the future. 
The leaders of the Middle West are Brand Whit- 
lock, Bryan, La Follette, Herbert Quick, Henry 
Ford, Booth Tarkington, Edward Ross, John R. 
Commons, William Allen White, The Mayos, Or- 



102 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

ville Wright. Not all of them are of first-rate men- 
tality. But they are honest, and their mistakes are 
the mistakes of an idealism unrelated to life as it 
is. The best of them have a vision for our coun- 
try that is not faintly perceived by the East. Their 
political ideal is Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman 
expressed what they are trying to make of our people. 
The stories of O. Henry describe this type of new 
American. 

A clear analysis of our Middle West is contained 
in the second of Monsieur Emile Hovelaque's ar- 
ticles in recent issues of the Revue de Paris. In that 
he shows how distance and isolation have operated 
to give our country, particularly the land-bound 
heart of it, a feeling of security, a sense of being 
unrelated to human events elsewhere on the planet. 
He shows how the break of the immigrant with his 
Old World has left his inner life emptied of the old 
retrospects, cut off from the ancestral roots. That 
vacancy the new man in the new world filled with 
formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brother- 
hood. He believed his experiment had cleared hu- 
man nature of its hates. He believed that ideals no 
longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a sub- 
stitute for the ancient warfare against the enemies 
of the race. And all the time he was busy with his 
new continent. Results, action, machinery, became 
his entire outer life. The Puritan strain in him, a 



NEUTRALITY 103 

religion of dealing very directly with life immedi- 
ately at hand, drove him yet the harder to tackle his 
own patch of soil, and then on to a fresh field in an- 
other town in another State: work, but work unre- 
lated to a national life — least of all was it related 
to an international ideal. 

And he let Europe go its own gait, till finally it 
has become a dim dream, and just now a very evil 
dream. But of concern in its bickerings he feels 
none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong 
in the European War. He confuses the criminal and 
the victim. He regards the Uhlan and the Gerbe- 
viller peasant as brothers. Why don't they cease 
their quarrel, and live as we live 4 ? 

That, in brief, is a digest of Hovelaque's search- 
ing analysis of our national soul at this crisis. We 
have not understood the war. We are not going 
to see it unless we are aided. If we do not see it, 
the future of the democratic experiment on this 
earth is imperiled. The friends of France and Eng- 
land lie out yonder on the prairies. The Allies have 
much to teach them, and much to learn from them. 
But to effect the exchange, England and France 
must be willing to speak to them through the voices 
they know — not alone through "Voix Americaines" 
of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney War- 
ren and President Lowell and Mr. Choate. England 
must speak to them through Collier's Weekly and 



104 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

the Saturday Evening Post and the newspaper syn- 
dicates. There is only one way of reaching Ameri- 
can public opinion — the newspapers and periodicals. 
No other agency avails. England must recognize 
the function of the correspondent in the modern de- 
mocracy. Through him come the facts and impres- 
sions on which the people make up its mind. He sup- 
plies public opinion with the material out of which 
to build policy. For our failure to understand the 
war, France and England must share the blame with 
America. We should have been ready enough to 
alter our indifference and ignorance into understand- 
ing, if only our writers had been aided to gain in- 
formation. 

But the Western Allies have little knowledge of 
American public opinion, and small desire to win it. 
They have sent some of our best men over in dis- 
gust to the enemy lines. Any one, coming on such 
a quest as I have been on, that of proving German 
methods from first-hand witness, is regarded by the 
Allies as partly a nuisance and partly misguided. If 
any public criticism is ever made of my country's 
attitude by the French or English, we, that have 
sought to serve the Allies, will be obliged to come 
forward and tell our experience: — namely, that it 
has been most difficult to obtain facts for America, 
as the Allies have seen fit to disregard her public 
opinion, and scorn the methods and channels of 
reaching that public opinion. 



II 

SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR 

I FOUND in Belgium the evidences of a German 
spy system, carried out systematically through 
a period of years. I saw widespread atrocities 
committed on peasant non-combatants by order of 
German officers. I saw German troops burn peas- 
ants' houses. I saw dying men, women and a child, 
who had been bayonetted by German soldiers as 
they were being used as a screen for advancing troops. 
What I had seen was reported to Lord Bryce by the 
young man with me, and the testimony appears in 
the Bryce report. I saw a ravaged city, 1,100 houses 
burned house by house, and sprinkled among the 
gutted houses a hundred houses undamaged, with 
German script on their door, saying, "Nicht ver- 
brennen. Gute leute wohnen hier." 

With witnesses and with photographs I had rein- 
forced my observation, so that I should not over- 
state or alter in making my report at home. Opposed 
to this machine of treachery and cruelty, I had seen 
an uprising of the people of three nations, men 

105 



106 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

hating war and therefore enlisted in this righteous 
war to preserve values more precious than the indi- 
vidual life. With a bitter and a costly experience, 
I had won my conviction that there were two wars 
on the western front. 

When I returned from a year in the war zone, 
five months of which was spent at the front, I looked 
forward to finding a constructive program, ham- 
mered out by the social work group, which would 
interpret the struggle and give our nation a call to 
action, I looked to social workers because I have 
long believed and continue to believe that social 
workers are the finest group of persons in our Ameri- 
can community. They seem to me in our vanguard 
because of a sane intelligence, touched with ethical 
purpose. 

It was a disappointment to find them scattered 
and negative, many of them anti-war, some of them 
members of the Woman's Peace Party, some even 
opposing the sending of ammunition to the Allies. 

Few elements in the war were more perplexing 
than the failure of our idealists to make their think- 
ing worthy of the sudden and immense crisis which 
challenged them. Absence of moral leadership in 
America was as conspicuous as the presence of inex- 
haustible stores of moral heroism in Europe. 

The very experts who have prepared accurate re- 
ports on social conditions are failing to inform them- 



SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR 107 

selves of the facts of this war. I have found social 
workers who have not studied the Bryce report, and 
who are unaware of the German diaries and German 
letters, specifying atrocities, citing "military neces- 
sity," and revealing a mental condition that makes 
"continuous mediation" as grim a piece of futility 
as it would be if applied to a maniac in the nursery 
about to brain a child. 

I heard the head of a famous institution, a mem- 
ber of the Woman's Peace Party, tell what promise 
of the future it gave when a German woman crossed 
the platform at The Hague and shook hands with a 
Belgian woman. There is something unworthy in 
citing that incident as answering the situation in 
Belgium, where at this hour that German woman's 
countrymen are holding the little nation in subjec- 
tion, and impoverishing it by severe taxation, after 
betraying it for many years, and then burning its 
homes and killing its peasants. An active unre- 
pentant murderer is not the same as a naughty child, 
whom you cajole into a conference of good-will. A 
pleasant passage of social amenity does not obliterate 
the destruction of a nation. Such haphazard treat- 
ment of a vast tragedy reveals that our people are 
not living at the same deep level as the young men 
I have known in Flanders, who are dying to defend 
the helpless and to preserve justice. 

I was asked by a secretary of the Woman's Peace 



io8 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Party to speak at Carnegie Hall to a mass meeting 
of pacifists. When I told her I should speak of the 
wrong done to Belgium which I had witnessed, and 
should state that the war must go on to a righteous 
finish, she withdrew her invitation, saying she was 
sorry the women couldn't listen to my stories. She 
said that her experience as a lawyer had shown 
her that punishment never accomplished anything, 
and the driving out of the Germans by military 
measures was punishment. 

I have known social workers to aid girl strikers 
in making their demands effective. Have the social 
workers as a unit denounced the continuing injus- 
tice to Belgium*? Protests, made by the Belgian 
government to Washington, of cruelties, of undue 
taxation, of systematic steam-roller crushing, were 
allowed to be filed in silence, so that these protests 
that cover more than twelve months of outrage are 
to-day unknown to the general public, and have not 
availed to mitigate one item of the evil. One was 
astonished by the sudden hush that had fallen on 
the altruistic group, so sensitive to corporate wrong- 
doing, so alert in defense of exploited children and 
women. Why the overnight change from sharp in- 
tolerance of successful injustice? 

I find that our philanthropists are held by a 
theory. The theory is in two parts. One is that 
war is the worst of all evils. The other is that war 



SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR 109 

can be willed out of existence. They believe that 
another way out can be found, by some sort of 
mutual understanding, continuous mediation, and 
overlooking of definite and hideous wrongs com- 
mitted by a combatant, wrongs that date back many 
years, so that out of long-continued treachery the 
atrocity sprang, like flame out of dung. 

They refuse to see a right and a wrong in this 
war. It is not to them as other struggles in life, as 
the struggle between the forces of decency and the 
vice trust with its army of owners, pimps, cadets and 
disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds 
slip into a confusion between right and wrong, a 
blurring of distinctions as sharp and fundamental as 
the distinction between chastity and licentiousness, 
between military necessity and human rights, be- 
tween a living wage and sweatshop labor. In their 
socialized pity, they have lost the consciousness 
of sin. 

I found a ready answer to the charges of hideous 
practice by the army of invasion — the answer, that 
war is always like that. But it is too easy to dismiss 
all these outrages as "war." That is akin to the 
easy generalizations of prohibition fanatics, of 
pseudo-Marxian Socialists, of Anarchists, of vegeta- 
rians, of Christian Scientists, and of many other sin- 
cere persons who overstate, who like to focus what 
is complex into a one-word statement. "Do away 



no OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

with drink at one stroke, and you have abolished 
unhappy marriages." "All modern business is bad." 
"Government is the worst of all evils." "Meat- 
eating leads to murder." 

Just as men-of-the-world theories on the inevita- 
bility of prostitution, with its "lost" girls, had to 
give way to the presence of facts on the commer- 
cialized traffic, so the pacifist position on the present 
war is untenable when confronted with the honey- 
combing of Belgium with spies through long years 
and with the state of mind and the resultant acts 
of infamy recorded by Germans in their letters and 
diaries. There is an incurable romanticism in the 
literature of the pacifists that is offensive to men in 
a tragic struggle. Let me quote two sentences from 
a peace pamphlet issued by friends of mine who are 
among the best-known social workers in the United 
States : 

"It (war) has found a world of friends and 
neighbors, and substituted a world of outlanders and 
aliens and enemies." 

This is a quaint picture of the ante-bellum situa- 
tion in Belgium, when the country was undermined 
with German clerks, superintendents, commercial 
travelers, summer residents, who were extracting in- 
formation and forwarding it to Berlin, buying up 
peasants for spies and building villas with concrete 
foundations for big guns. "Friends and neighbors" 



SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR m 

is a rhetorical flourish that hurts when applied to 
German officers riding into towns as conquerors 
where for years they had been entertained as social 
guests. 

"In rape and cruelty and rage, ancient brutishness 
trails at the heels of all armies." 

That description is just when applied to the Ger- 
man army of invasion which practiced widespread 
murder on non-combatants. It is inaccurate, and 
therefore unjust, when applied to the Belgian, 
French and British armies. I have lived and worked 
as a member of the allied army for five months. It 
does not trail brutishness. It is fighting from high 
motive with honorable methods. It is unfortunate 
to overlay the profound reality of the war with a 
mental concept. 

To summarize : 

1. The social workers have failed to apply their 
high moral earnestness to this war. They have not 
accepted the war as a revelation of the human spirit 
in one of its supreme struggles between right and 
wrong. As the result their words have offended, as 
light words will always hurt men who are sacrific- 
ing property and ease and life itself for the sake of 
an ideal. 

2. They have neglected to inform themselves of 
the facts of the war. As the result, they have made 



112 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

no positive program and taken no constructive 
action. 

Let them deal with such facts as the German villa 
in the Belgian town where we lived — a villa that 
was a fortification with a deep concrete foundation 
for a heavy gun. I want them to face, as I had to 
face, the eighty-year-old peasant woman with a 
bayonet thrust through her thigh, and the twelve- 
year-old girl with her back cut open to the back- 
bone by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our 
social workers shall hold their peace in the presence 
of universal suffering and not mock noble sacrifice 
with tales of drugged soldiers? It was not the vine- 
gar on hyssop that explains the deed on the cross. 
Is it too much to ask them to abstain from their 
peace parties and their anti-munitions campaigns? 

We should listen to these leaders more readily if 
we had seen them risking their lives like the boys of 
the American Ambulance. To weigh sacrifice in 
detached phrases calls for an equal measure of 
service and a shared peril. If a few of our social 
workers had been wounded under fire, we should feel 
that their companions in the hazard were speaking 
from some such depth of experience as the peasants 
of Lorraine. But our idealists have not spoken from 
this initiation. Miss Addams is still puzzled and 
grieved by the response her words about drugged 
soldiers called out. Mr. Wilson is annoyed that 



SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR 113 

his phrase of "too proud to fight" gave little pleasure 
to the mothers of dead boys. 

With fuller knowledge our leaders will turn to and 
build us a program we can follow, a program of 
action that preserves the immutable distinction be- 
tween right and wrong, that lends strength to those 
dying for the right. With such frank taking of 
sides, let me give two instances where definite results 
could be achieved. They are both highly supposi- 
titious cases. But they will serve. 

Let us suppose, that at this moment the Russian 
government, under cover of the war, is harrying and 
suppressing the Russian revolutionary centers in 
Paris and London — the French and British govern- 
ments remaining complacent to the act because of 
the present war alliance. If we had a staunch public 
opinion, resulting in a strong government policy at 
Washington which had decided there was a right 
and a wrong on the western front, and which had 
thrown the immense weight of its moral support to 
the defenders of Belgium, such a government would 
be in a position to make a friendly suggestion to 
France and England that "live and let live" for 
Russian liberalism would be appreciated. 

Let us take another imaginative case. Suppose 
that, under cover of the war, Japan was tightening 
her hold on China, and gradually turning China into 
a subject state. If our government were on relations 



114 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

of powerful friendship with the Allies, it would be 
conceivable that England could be asked to hint 
gently that unseemly pressure from Tokyo was un- 
desirable. The English fleet is a fact in the world 
of reality. 

What is needed precisely is a foreign policy that 
will strengthen the tendencies toward world peace, 
based on justice. By our indecision and failure to 
take a stand, we have lessened our moral value to 
the world. It is weak thinking that advocates a 
policy and is too timid to use the instruments that 
will shape it. Because we want a restored Belgium 
and France and a world peace, we need statesmen 
who are effective in attaining these things. We need 
men who can suggest a diplomatic gain in the cause 
of justice that the nations will agree on, because of 
a government at Washington that carries weight 
with the diplomats who will bring it to pass. We 
want to see the friendship of France and England 
and Canada regained. We are letting all these 
things slip. There will come a day when it is too 
late to do anything except develop regrets. Why 
should not social workers declare themselves in 
time? 

At a season of national gravity, when the future 
for fifty years may be determined inside of four 
years, we want those men for our leaders who can 
work results in the world of time and space, instead 



SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR 115 

of dream liberations in the untroubled realms of 
moral consciousness. 

Before we have an all-embracing internationalism, 
we must have a series of informal alliances, where 
the forces of modern democracy tend to range on 
one side, and the autocratic nations tend to range 
on the other side. There will be strange mixtures, 
of course, on both sides, even as there are in the 
present war. But the grand total will lean ever more 
and more to righteousness. Righteousness will pre- 
vail in spite of us, but how much fairer our lot if 
we are ranged with the "great allies — exultations, 
agonies, and love," and man's unconquerable will to 
freedom. 



Ill 



FORGETTING THE AMERICAN TRADITION 

THE Chicago 'Evening American places on its 
editorial page on August 10, 1916, a letter 
to which it gives editorial approval. The 
letter says: "There are thousands of German-born 
citizens, in fact the writer knows of no others, whose 
very German origin has made them immune against 
such influences as ancestry, literature, sentiment and 
language, which count for so much in their effect 
upon a great percentage of our population. These 
very men continue to be loyal Americans. If we 
are disloyal, what then do you call the Choates, the 
Roosevelts, the Eliots, and the foreign-born Haven 
Putnams?" 

The letter is signed M. Kirchberger. Mr. Hearst 
finds this statement of sufficient importance to 
spread out before five or six million readers of his 
newspapers. It is of importance, because it voices 
the belief of an ever-increasing element in our popu- 
lation. Our ancestry, literature, sentiment and lan- 
guage do produce such men as Joseph Choate, Theo- 

116 



FORGETTING TRADITION 117 

dore Roosevelt, Charles William Eliot and George 
Haven Putnam. Those names do go straight back 
in our national history to the original stock, which 
shaped our national policy and ideals. It was their 
ancestry, English and American literature, their 
racial sentiment, and the English language, which 
made the historic America. Mr. Kirchberger be- 
lieves them to be disloyal to the New America. I 
trust he and his numerous clan will define what sort 
of country he wants to make of us, what ancestry 
he wishes to have prevail, what literature he will 
introduce into our schools, what sentiment and what 
language. I hope his group will come out into the 
open with their program of action. For they have 
one. He sees clearly that the civilization of a nation 
is the resultant of its racial inheritance, its litera- 
ture, its language and its ideas about life. He means 
that our civilization shall go his way, not the way 
of the Choates and Eliots. He has no quarrel what- 
ever with the vague internationalism of many of 
our social workers because under that fog he and 
his kind can operate unobserved. I do not under- 
estimate the influence of such thought as his. It is 
growing stronger every day. It is sharply defined, 
forceful, and it will prevail unless we fight it. 

When one comes among us, sharing the privileges 
of citizenship, to tell us that he is "immune" from 
the claims of our great ancestry, and the noble sen- 



n8 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

timent of our past, he is striking at the heart of our 
nationality. He is vastly more significant than his 
own alien voice. For his claims are being advocated 
by editors and politicians. His ideas are sweeping 
our communities. Our nation does not live be- 
cause it is a geographical unit, nor because it accepts 
all the races of Europe. It lives because it fought 
at Yorktown side by side with Rochambeau and his 
Frenchmen. It lives in the songs of Whittier and 
in the heart of Lincoln. By its past of struggle for 
ideas it has given us a heritage. But we have sub- 
stituted pacifism and commercialism for the old 
struggle, and we have substituted phrases for the 
old ideas which cost sacrifice to maintain. If enough 
citizens become "immune" from the influences that 
have shaped us, we shall lose our historic continuity, 
and become the sort of nation which these enemies 
would have us be. But these considerations do not 
bring alarm to our leaders. Our leaders supply 
the very intellectual defense for this treason. They 
supply it in the doctrine of so-called international- 
ism. 

Let us without delay select our position and hold 
it. Let us stand firmly on our traditions and history. 
We have no wish to be "immune" from our language 
and literature, our sentiment and ancestry. We 
need a fresh inoculation of those "influences." Let 
us reinforce the policy of Franklin which recognized 



FORGETTING TRADITION 119 

the desirability of friendship with France and Eng- 
land. Let us restate the policy of Lincoln, who 
paused in the stress of a great war to strike hands 
with the workers of England, because they and he 
were at one in the love of liberty. 

No single factor of race and climate, language and 
culture is determinative on that central power of 
cohesion which gathers a multitude of persons — 
"infinitely repellent particles" — into an organism 
which lives its life in unity, and forms its tradition 
from a collective experience. But it does not follow 
that some one of these factors cannot be so strength- 
ened as to disturb the balance. If the geographical 
territory is carved up the nation is destroyed. Suc- 
cessive waves of immigration can drown out the 
sharply defined character of a people. This is now 
taking place in the United States. The proof is our 
reaction to the war. It is not that we revealed 
differences of "opinion." It is that we were untrue 
to our tradition. 

It is easy to throw the discussion into nonsense by 
asking: Is there any such thing as a pure race? Are 
not the greatest nations of mixed blood? Do you 
think race and nation are the same thing? It is 
true that no one thing is determinative in the mak- 
ing of a nation. Race and language, culture and 
government, border line and climate, religion and 
economic system, are each an influence, and, to- 



120 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

gether, they shape the people in face and habit till 
they walk the earth with a new stride and look out 
on the world with different eyes from those of any 
people elsewhere. But the supreme thing about a 
nation is that it happened. A certain group of peo- 
ple developed affinities and aspirations, cohered and 
became an organism, fought its way to independence, 
and remembered the blood it had spilled. That tra- 
dition of common experience and sacrifice in victory 
and defeat is the cord that binds the generations. 
It is a spiritual ancestry that colors every thought 
and governs every action. An English historian, 
Professor Ramsay Muir, has stated this aptly. He 
writes : 

"The most potent of all nation-molding factors, 
the one indispensable factor which must be present 
whatever else be lacking, is the possession of a com- 
mon tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and 
victories won in common, expressed in song and 
legend, in the dear names of great personalities that 
seem to embody in themselves the character and 
ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred 
places wherein the national memory is enshrined." 

Gilbert K. Chesterton said to me: 

"Certain people like the arrangements under 
which they live. They prefer to die rather than to 
let other people come in and change things. Even 
if their nation decides on a policy that is suicidal, 



FORGETTING TRADITION 121 

they would rather die with her than live without 
her. That is nationality. When the call came, the 
citizens of the nations answered with what was deep 
in their subconsciousness. All resolutions to act 
as 'workers,' as members of an 'International,' fell 
away. If pacifists of the ruling class, like Miss 
Hobhouse and Bertrand Russell, would analyze 
what is really in their mind, they would find that 
what they dislike is the spectacle of democracy en- 
thusiastically and unanimously agreeing to do some- 
thing. They distrust democracy on the march. It 
is their artistocratic sense that disapproves. Just 
now, it is the Kaiser whom the democracies are 
marching out to find, and the people are not behav- 
ing as the pacifists would like to have them." 

This idea of nationalism, instead of being an early 
and now obsolete idea, is a recent and a noble idea. 
What the common life of the home is to the father 
and mother and children, through poverty and child- 
birth and fame, that is the life of a nation to its 
citizens. In the blood of sacrifice it is welded to- 
gether. Mixed races cannot dilute it, a doctored 
border cannot suppress it, a stern climate cannot 
quench it, an oppressive government cannot enslave 
it. Only one thing can destroy it and that is when 
it annuls its past and weakens at the heart. When 
it ceases to respond to the great ideas that once 
aroused it, then it is time for those who love it to 



122 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

look to the influences at work that have made it 
forgetful. The denial of that common experience, 
the refusal to inherit the great tradition, the un- 
willingness to continue the noble and costly policy 
- — these mark the decline of a nation. These are the 
signs of peril we see in the unwieldy life of our 
immense democracy to-day. The call that came to 
us from France was the same voice that we once 
knew as the voice of our most precious friend. By 
our failure to respond we show that we have allowed 
something alien to enter our inmost life. In our 
equal failure to safeguard our own helpless non- 
combatants, we reveal that the old compulsions no 
longer move us. By the cry that went up from half 
our nation — not of outrage at stricken France, not 
of anger for slaughtered children of our own race — 
but that strange mystical cry, "He kept us out of 
war," we betray that we have lost our hardihood. 
We have been overwhelmed by numbers. We have 
suffered such a heaping up of new elements that 
we have no time to teach our tradition, no will to 
continue our race experience. 

I was talking of this recently with a profound 
student of race psychology, Havelock Ellis. He 
said that the determining factor is the strength of 
the civilization receiving the fresh contributions. Is 
that civilization potent enough to shape the new 
contributions? The French have always had their 



FORGETTING TRADITION 123 

boundaries beaten in upon by other races, but so 
distinctive, so salient, is their civilization that it 
absorbs the invasion. He said that the question to 
decide is whether the cells are sufficiently organized 
and determinate to receive alien matter. 

Surely no student of our social conditions can 
say that our tendencies are clear, our collective will 
formed, our national mind unified. We keep add- 
ing chemical elements without coming to a solution. 
England accepted a few invasions and conquests and 
then had to stiffen up and work the material into a 
mold. France was overrun every half century, but 
finally she drew the sacred circle around her bor- 
ders, and proceeded to the work of coalescing her 
parts. Our present stream of tendency, and our 
present grip on our own historic tradition, are not 
strong enough to admit of immense new European 
contributions. We are losing the sense of what we 
mean as a people. 

In dealing with any pet assumption of modern 
thought, one must guard against misunderstanding. 
The opponent calls one reactionary and then one's 
day in court is over. Or the opponent pushes a plain 
statement over into an academic discussion, and the 
whole matter at issue is befogged. I am not attack- 
ing the desirability of a true internationalism. I 
am saying that our conception of it is all wrong, 
and that our method of attaining it is futile. The 



124 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

greater day of peace between nations will not come 
by weakening the ties of nationality. It will come 
through a deepening of the sense of citizenship in 
each nation. But much of our recent thinking has 
tended to weaken the claims of nationality. It is 
against this that we must set ourselves. We want 
internationalism, but the internationalism we mean 
is an understanding and a good will between dis- 
tinct nations, not an internationalism which is the 
loss of a rich variety, and the blurring of distinc- 
tions. Nations will not disappear. They will 
heighten their individuality under the process of 
time. The hope of peace lies in the appreciation 
of those differences. We are not to reach inter- 
nationalism by ceasing to become nations, as our 
present-day theorists advocate. There lies the 
service of the war. It has taught us that the French- 
man and the German will refuse to merge their ideas 
about life and duty in a denationalized world league. 
Each wants his plot of ground, his own patch of 
sky, his own kind of a world, with those men for 
neighbors who think as he thinks. The Frenchman 
does not wish to be speeded up by universal voca- 
tional training, and a governmental regime where 
efficiency and organization are the aims of the cor- 
porate life. The German does not wish his world 
to contain waste and laziness and dilettantism. A 
hundred years ago the world put up a sign in front 



FORGETTING TRADITION 125 

of incroaching France: "No trespassing on these 
premises." To-day the grass of France is red where 
the marauder crossed the line. I have seen the soul 
of France at tension for two years, and I know that 
her agony has deepened her sense of nationality. 

It is easy to retort that it is the nationalism of 
Germany that has spread fire and blood across 
Europe. But it is easier yet to give the final an- 
swer. There are diseases of individuality — the 
"artistic temperament," egoism, freakishness, crim- 
inality — which require chastening. But because cer- 
tain individuals have to be restrained, we do not 
crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free 
play of development. There are diseases of nation- 
alism — the lust for power and territory, the desire 
to impose the will, the language and the customs, 
on smaller units. When a nation hands over its 
foreign policy and its personal morality to the state, 
which is only the machinery of a nation, and when 
the machine, operated by a little group of imperial- 
ists instead of by the collective will of the nation, 
turns to organized aggression, there is catastrophe. 
Prussian history from the vivisection of Poland, 
through the rape of Schleswig and the crushing of 
Paris, to the assassination of Belgium, offers us no 
guarantees of a common aim for human welfare. 
But it is because nationality has been betrayed, not 



126 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

because it has been expressed. The Uhlan officer, 
murdering women, is no reason for abolishing 
Habeas Corpus. The misbehavior of Germany is no 
excuse for rebuking the liberty of France. 

At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of 
reality, internationalism crumbles — the internation- 
alism, I mean, that disbelieves in national quality, 
and disregards essential differences. Groups of 
"workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists, 
dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the 
terrible method by which nations have created them- 
selves, and by which they have defended their be- 
ing. Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom 
of the disease of a false internationalism. Pacifism 
springs from the belief that nations do not matter, 
that "humanity is the great idea." "Why should 
nations go to war, since the principle of nationality 
is not vital?" But, actually, this principle is vital. 
"An effective internationalism can only be rendered 
possible by a triumphant nationalism." The present 
war is a fight by the little nations of Belgium and 
Serbia, and by the great nation, France, for the 
preservation of their nationality. We have failed 
to understand "the causes and objects" of this war, 
because we have weakened our own sense of nation- 
ality. Our tradition has been drowned out by new 
voices. Ninety years ago, we responded to Greece, 



FORGETTING TRADITION 127 

and, later, to Garibaldi and Kossuth. To-day, only 
those understand the fight of the nations who have 
been reared in our American tradition. Richard 
Neville Hall went from Dartmouth College and 
died on an Alsatian Hill, serving France. A friend 
writes of him: "He was saying things about the 
France of Washington and Lafayette, how he had 
been brought up on the tradition of that historic 
friendship." 

I have found something inspiring in the action of 
these young Americans in France. Perhaps out of 
them will come the leadership which our country 
lacks. My own generation moves on to middle life, 
and, as is the way of elders, reveals moderation of 
mind and a good-natured acceptance of conditions. 
Nothing is to be hoped for from us. The great gen- 
eration of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe is 
dead, and the next generation of George Haven Put- 
nam and Eliot and O. O. Howard is dying. There 
is nowhere to turn but to the young. They must 
strive where we have failed. They must fight where 
we were neutral. I have seen some hundreds of these 
youth who love France because they love America. 
In them our tradition is continued. Through them 
the American idea can be reaffirmed for all our peo- 
ple. May they remember their dead, their boy- 
comrades who fell in service at the front. They 
have shared in the greatness of France. May they 



128 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

come home to us very sure of their possession. We 
have nothing for them. Complacent in our neutral- 
ity, and fat with our profits, we have lost our chance. 
They bring us moral leadership. 

Now, all this will have no appeal to the many 
nationalities among us. The American tradition 
(except for a few personalities and ideas) is mean- 
ingless to them. I have dealt with their needs in 
the preceding chapter. I am writing these next 
chapters for the inheritors of our American tradi- 
tion, who have grown slack and cosmopolitan, who, 
though of the blood-strain and cultural conscious- 
ness that fought our wars and created our civiliza- 
tion, are now too tired, some of them, to do any- 
thing but exploit the other nationalities which have 
tumbled in on the later waves of immigration. 
Others of us are simply swamped by the multitude 
and find our refuge in cosmopolitanism. "They're 
all alike. They will all be Americans to-morrow. 5 ' 
If these tame descendants of America will be true to 
their own tradition, they will learn to be merciful 
to their fellow-countrymen with quite other tradi- 
tions. It is precisely because we "old-timers" have 
been forgetting our tradition that we have been 
blind to the rich inherited life of those that come 
to us. If we recover our own sense of spiritual 
values, we shall welcome the tradition and the hope 
which the humblest Jew has brought us. 



IV 



COSMOPOLITANISM 



COSMOPOLITANISM is the attempt to 
deny the instinct of nationality. It works in 
three ways with us. It seeks to impose an 
English culture on our mixed races ; it seeks to create 
an American type at one stroke; it preaches an 
undiscriminating indeterminate merging of national 
cultures into a new blend, "the human race," which 
will be composed of individuals pretty much alike, 
with the same aspirations. The differences of in- 
heritance will be thrown away like the bundle from 
the pilgrim's back. Modern thought is permeated 
with this "new religion of humanity," which is 
going to accomplish what the Roman Empire and 
the Spanish Inquisition failed to do: unify the 
infinite variety of human nature. 

One of its analysts says that "internally it is pro- 
ductive of many evil vapors which issue from the 
lips in the form of catchwords." He traces it to 
ill-assimilated education, and sees its final stage 
when "the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed 
of his parentage and nationality, is intensely miser- 

129 



130 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

able." He is the man without roots, who has lost 
his contacts with the ideas, the ethic, the customs, 
the affectionate attachments, out of which social life 
develops. 

For the last fifty years certain Germans have 
preached a boundless cosmopolitanism, while the 
German people have practiced an intense ingrowing 
racialism. It is, of course, true that these men who 
preached it were themselves rebels against the Ger- 
man system. Karl Marx, Lasselle, Engels, helped 
to found an international movement in protest 
against the form of nationality within which they 
lived. But the direction and violence of their re- 
bound were governed by the hard surface from 
which they recoiled. The personality of these men 
and the tonic value of their thought have been of 
inestimable benefit to our age. In their main posi- 
tion they were much nearer the truth than their 
opponents. But the precise point I am dealing with 
is their theory of cosmopolitanism. And here a 
grievous personal experience in a cramping environ- 
ment misled these early radicals, and they incor- 
porated in their program the anti-national item 
which did not belong. Because their analysis of 
conditions was in the main so searching, so just, 
their thought has continued to exercise a profound 
influence, and the animating ideas in their philoso- 
phy of history and in their analysis of industrialism 
were imported to England and to America. The 



COSMOPOLITANISM 131 

stern and unbending leaders of socialist thought 
have reproduced their masters' voice with an almost 
unchanged accent. A few great Russians contributed 
to the same theory of cosmopolitanism, and have 
powerfully affected groups of modern thinkers. I 
doubt if any single idea has traveled further and 
more swiftly than this idea that the sense of nation- 
ality is a mistaken thing, and that a something 
wider and vaguer is the goal of the future. The 
Latin races have sometimes thought they believed 
it, but they quickly corrected their thinking under 
the impact of event. 

Our present school of softened, daintily stepping 
radicals have whittled away some of the original 
doctrine of the class war. The materialistic theory 
of history, surplus value and the proletarian divi- 
sion have had to yield in part to the facts of the 
case. But the modern reformers cling to that crea- 
tion of German and Russian thought, a cosmopoli- 
tan world, the merging of races and nations into a 
universal undifferentiated brotherhood with gradu- 
ally disappearing boundaries. We find it in our in- 
telligent skilled social workers. I mention them in 
no unfriendliness, but because I believe that they 
and their group are a noble influence in our country, 
and because their blindness and failure in this crisis 
are a grief to me and to thousands of other persons 
who have looked to them for leadership. We find 
this idea of cosmopolitanism in the modern essayists, 



132 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

who are read in America, like Lowes Dickinson, Ber- 
trand Russell, and Bernard Shaw. This doctrine 
has misled our social workers, our socialists, our 
radicals in social reform, our feminists — almost 
every element in our social movement. Our Ameri- 
can radicalism is permeated with a vague cosmopoli- 
tanism, and its child, pacifism. At no point has 
"modern" thought exercised a pro founder effect than 
on our social movement. 

We need the check here of the Latin mentality. 
The clear Latin mind refuses to be misled by 
idealistic phrases, whose meaning does not permit of 
analysis into concrete terms. The French and Ital- 
ians have recognized that the contribution of nation- 
ality is vital to the future. Their conception of 
social change is healthier than ours. It is Mazzini 
and not Karl Marx who was the prophet of a sane 
evolution. Mazzini says: 



"Every people has its special mission, which will co- 
operate towards the fulfillment of the general mission of 
Humanity. That mission constitutes its nationality. Na- 
Lionality is sacred. 

"In laboring, according to true principles, for our 
country we are laboring for humanity. Our country is 
the fulcrum of the lever which we have to wield for the 
common good. If we give up this fulcrum, we run the 
risk of becoming useless both to our country and to 
humanity. 

"Do not be led away by the idea of improving your 



COSMOPOLITANISM 133 

material conditions without first solving the national 
question. You cannot do it. 

"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true 
country is the idea to which it gives birth." It is "A 
common principle, recognized, accepted, and developed 
by all." 

His thought is clear and consistent. How shall a 
man serve all humanity whom he has not seen, if 
he does not serve his nation whom he has seen 4 ? 
"The individual is too insignificant, and humanity 
too vast." The stuff of nationality is the sacrifice 
rendered by the people to realize their aspirations 
— "By the memory of our former greatness, by the 
sufferings of the millions.' ' The limits of national- 
ity will tend toward natural boundaries — the divi- 
sion of 

"humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face 
of the earth, thus creating the germ of nationalities. Evil 
governments have disfigured the divine design. Never- 
theless you may still trace it, distinctly marked out — as 
least as far as Europe is concerned — by the course of the 
great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and 
other geographical conditions. They (the Governments) 
have disfigured it so far that, if we except England and 
France, there is not perhaps a single country whose pres- 
ent boundaries correspond to that design. Natural divi- 
sions, and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the peo- 
ples, will take the place of the arbitrary divisions sanc- 
tioned by evil governments. The map of Europe will 
be redrawn. 



134 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

"Then may each one of you, fortified by the power 
and the affection of many millions, all speaking the same 
language, gifted with the same tendencies, and educated 
by the same historical tradition, hope, even by your own 
single effort, to be able to benefit all Humanity. O my 
brothers, love your Country ! Our Country is our Home, 
the house that God has given us, placing therein a nu- 
merous family that loves us, and whom we love; a family 
with whom we sympathize more readily, and whom we 
understand more quickly than we do others; and which, 
from its being centered round a given spot, and from the 
homogeneous nature of its elements, is adapted to a special 
branch of activity." 

The method of strengthening the sense of nation- 
ality is by education. "Every citizen should re- 
ceive in the national schools a moral education, a 
course of nationality — comprising a summary view 
of the progress of humanity and of the history of 
his own country; a popular exposition of the prin- 
ciples directing the legislation of that country." 

That Mazzini's ideas are a living force to-day is 
proved by the response of the nations in this war. 
In the seaside town of Hove, Sussex, where I live, 
his book, developing these ideas, was drawn out 
from the public library thirty-eight times in the last 
four years. 

There is a danger here of over-stressing national- 
ity and inviting a return to the anarchy of war, and 
this is the difficulty one has in pointing out the 
psychologic unsoundness of Cosmopolitanism. The 



COSMOPOLITANISM 135 

limitations of the Mazzini theory have been con- 
vincingly drawn by Graham Wallas. 

"Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck ("We 
must not swallow more than we can digest") or by Mazzini, 
played a great and invaluable part in the development 
of the political consciousness of Europe during the nine- 
teenth century. But it is becoming less and less possible 
to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth 
century." 

Wallas shows that Mazzini enormously exagger- 
ated the simplicity of the question. National types 
are not divided into homogeneous units "by the 
course of the great rivers and the direction of the 
high mountains," but are intermingled from village 
to village. Do the Balkan mountains represent the 
purposes of God in Macedonia 4 ? And for which 
nationality, Greek or BulgarV The remedy, as 
Wallas sees it, for recurring war between nations 
is an international science of eugenics which might 
"indicate that the various races should aim, not at 
exterminating each other, but at encouraging the 
improvement by each of its own racial type." In 
this way the emotion of political solidarity can be 
slowly made possible between individuals of con- 
sciously different national types. A political emo- 
tion, if it is to do away with war, cannot be created 
by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must 
be based, "not upon a belief in the likeness of indi- 



136 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

vidual human beings, but upon the recognition of 
their unlikeness." We in America have tried to 
deny the facts of psychology by calling all our new- 
comers Americans. We have sought to escape our 
problem by shutting our eyes to the infinite dis- 
similarity of the individuals in our population. The 
only direction for hope to travel is that the im- 
provement of the whole species will come rather 
from "a conscious world-purpose based upon a rec- 
ognition of the value of racial as well as individual 
variety than from mere fighting." This is the true 
internationalism, and it differs as widely from a cos- 
mopolitan blur which "makes" Americans as from 
the bitter enforced nationality of blood and iron, 
or spiritual imperial arrogance. 

I have found a perfectly clear statement of what 
lies loosely in the mind of modern Americans of 
mixed race and intense pre-occupation with the game 
of getting on. I have found it in the editorial 
columns of a Middle Western paper. The Cedar 
Rapids Gazette says: 

EXTINCT AMERICANS 

"The authorities who fear that the American race will 
'die out' may not have noticed that all the ingredients of 
that race are still being born in Europe at about the usual 
rate. And, at the worst, if one American race dies out there 
will be another race as good or better in America to take its 
place. 



COSMOPOLITANISM 137 

"Several American races have already died to the extent 
that the members are no longer to be separately identified 
and their distinctive ideas no longer exert influence on the 
country. Among the vanished races are the Pilgrims, the 
Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Huguenots, the Acadian voy- 
agers, the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania and New Jer- 
sey Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio and 
southern Indiana, the picturesque Yankee, the southeastern 
Cracker, the typical Plainsman and Cowboy, each of whom 
in his time and place was the representative of a small 
and distinct nationality. 

"The Americans of two generations are unlike. To use 
an Irish epigram, change is the only established character- 
istic of the American. The American in whose veins flows 
the blood of half a dozen European races, whose grand- 
parents may have been born in four states, his parents in 
two states ; whose wife may have been born in a state other 
than his own and whose four children may be married to 
men and women of four nationalities, is not worrying 
greatly regarding the exact composition of the 'American 
race.' Individually he has on hand a rather complete 
stock of the ingredients and is satisfied with the idea that 
he is doing his best to help establish a representative order 
of humanity. 

"There is no need to worry about the passing of a race. 
The world and humanity are the big ideas. The race 
that deserves to die will pass. The race that fights for 
its existence, whose members have pride in their kind, 
will live. A race is recruited only through the cradle. 
A race that disregards its young is doomed. But man- 
kind will not be less numerous and that which is of value 
will survive. Not only the end of the race, but the end 
of the world is in sight for those who leave no children 
to perpetuate their bodies and their minds." 



138 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

The trouble with that is that it is devoid of self- 
respect. It gives no foundation for ethics. It gives 
no sanction for religion. It gives no soil and roots 
for literature. It treats the life of man as if it were 
grass to flourish and perish. It treats men as me- 
chanical units in a political and industrial system. 
They go to their lathe in the factory, attend a 
motion-picture show in the evening, and so on for 
a few years to dissolution. It is pessimistic with a 
dark annihilating quality. And it is a habit of mind 
that is growing among us. It is the inevitable re- 
flex of our bright surface optimism, which drowns 
thought in speed and change, and believes that 
activity under scientific direction can satisfy the 
human spirit. 

Actually the stock we came of matters very much 
— for ourselves. Being dead, it yet lives, and we 
are the channel of its ongoing. Only by using the 
inheritance that comes to us can we lead the life 
of the mind in art and ethics and religion. "Huckle- 
berry Finn," "The Virginian," "Still Jim," "The 
Valley of the Moon," and "Ethan Frome," possess 
a permanence of appeal precisely because they are 
rooted in the sense of nationality, and are a natural 
growth out of a tradition. Each story describes a 
vanishing race, and deals with a locality assailed 
by change. Each is a momentary arrest in time 
of an ebbing tide. Each has the unconscious pathos 
of a last stand. But not one of these books would 



COSMOPOLITANISM 139 

have carried beyond the day of its appearance if it 
had dealt with a life-history removed from its long 
inheritance. It is only so that the nations among 
us will in time produce their literature. It will 
not be by surface types of "rapid" Americans. It 
will rather be by rendering the individual (whether 
Jew or Bohemian) in all the loneliness of crowds 
and modern cities, and revealing the thoughts and 
"notions" and desires that have come dov/n to him 
from his very ancient past, and his little ripple of 
activity in the endless stream of descent. Mon- 
tague Glass and Joseph Hergesheimer and Fannie 
Hurst are aware of this necessity of relating their 
art to the instinctive life of their character, and so 
under the brightest crackle of their American smart- 
ness something goes echoing back to a day that is 
older than the Coney Island and Broadway and 
Atlantic City of their setting. Joseph Stella in his 
drawings has shown perception of this by anchoring 
his type in its inherited life, and his steel workers 
are better than many reports of Mr. Gary on how 
it is with America at the Pittsburgh blast fur- 
naces. 

But not only is the sense of nationality needed 
for the finer activities of the mind. There is need 
of it in "practical" politics. It is discouraging that 
our American social movement has been captured by 
cosmopolitanism. For the immediate future lies 
with radical changes in the world of environment. 



140 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Living conditions are going to be improved. A 
greater measure of equality will be achieved in our 
own time. But how is the social change inside the 
country to be related to other States'? What shall 
be our foreign policy"? This is where the cosmo- 
politanism of our radical group is a poor guide for 
action. It is the vice of liberals that they don't 
harness their ideas to facts. The result is that at 
time of crisis the power slips over in the hands of 
Tory reactionaries. We have seen a recent instance 
in England, where the liberals shirked the war dur- 
ing the premonitory years. As the result, the good 
old stand-pat crowd of Tories came in with a rush, 
simplv because on foreign policy they had a pro- 
gram which at least dealt with the facts of the case. 
Until liberals are willing to think through on 
foreign policy, studying European and world his- 
tory, denning the meaning of the State and visual- 
izing its relationship to other States, we shall have 
a skimmed-milk pacifism as their largest contribu- 
tion to the problems of nation-States, submerged 
nationalities, backward races, exploitable territory 
and international straits, canals and ports of call. 
That is unfortunate. For, unless the liberal mind 
is brought to bear on foreign policy, we shall con- 
tinue to have that policy manipulated by little 
groups of expert imperialists. These inner cliques 
present a program of action based on fact-study, 
which wins public opinion, because the instinct of 






COSMOPOLITANISM 141 

the people trusts men who know what they want 
more than it trusts a bland benevolence without 
direction of aim. 

Our social workers and other liberals would not 
think of advocating a policy of "Christianizing" the 
employer as the sole remedy for social maladjust- 
ment. But this is precisely the sort of thing they 
advocate in inter-State relationship. They seek to 
work by spiritual conversion, turning the hearts of 
the rulers to righteousness and softening the mood 
of the bellicose mass-people. And the chaos of the 
outer world will continue to pour into our tight 
little domestic compartments of nicely-adjusted 
social relationships. 

In a word, foreign policy and domestic policy are 
of one piece, and the same realism must be applied 
to questions like the neutrality of Belgium and the 
internationalization of Constantinople which we 
apply to wage-scales. Until men of liberal tend- 
ency are willing to devote the same hard study 
to the map which they put on social reform and 
internal development, the world will continue to 
turn to its only experts on foreign policy, who un- 
fortunately are largely imperialists. 



THE HYPHENATES 



A 



FAMOUS American president once said to 
a distinguished ambassador: 



"We make them into Americans. They come in immi- 
grants of all nationalities, but they rapidly turn into 
Americans and make one nation." 

And the ambassador thought within himself and 
later said to me: 

"But a nation is a people with a long experience, who 
have lived and suffered together. There is a bell in a 
great church, which if you lightly flick it with the finger- 
nail, gives out one single tone which goes echoing through 
the Cathedral. If you stand at the far end, you can hear 
that tone. So it is with a nation. If it is struck, it re- 
sponds as one man to its furthest border. At the stroke 
of crisis it answers with one tone." 

No. We are not a nation. We are a bundle of 
nationalities, and some day we shall be a Common- 
wealth if we deal wisely with these nations who 
dwell among us. 

We cannot "make" Americans. We can make 
"imitation Americans," as Alfred Zimmern calls 
them. The Jew, spiritually sensitive and intellect- 
ually acute, becomes an "amateur Gentile." The 

142 



THE HYPHENATES 143 

imaginative Calabrian, of rich social impulse, be- 
comes a flashily dressed Padrone. The poetic, re- 
ligious Irishman, whose instinct has been communal 
for many centuries, becomes a district leader. These 
individuals have come to us with rare and charm- 
ing gifts, fruit of their nationality. Instead of 
frankly accepting them in their inheritance, we have 
applied a hasty conversion which denied their life 
of inherited impulses and desires. Instead of bring- 
ing out the good in them, we have Americanized 
them into commercial types. 

Where does our future lie"? 

It lies in developing and making use of men like 
the great Jews, Abram Jacobi, Charles Proteus 
Steinmetz and Louis Brandeis, who are true to their 
own nature, and who respond to the American en- 
vironment. These men are not amateur Gentiles. 
They are Jews and they are Americans. It lies in 
Italians like Dr. Stella, who love those elements in 
Italy which are liberal, and who further every effort 
in America to create free institutions. We need 
the help of every man of them to save our country 
from commercialism. 

Recently I asked one of the most brilliant of 
living scholars, of German descent, to give me his 
views on the future in America. He wrote: 

"What is America to do? I should answer: preach 
hyphenation. Make the common man realize that national- 



144 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

ity is a spiritual force which has in essence as little to do 
with government as religion has. When government in- 
terferes with freedom of worship, religion comes into politics 
and stays there till its course is unimpeded. The same 
is true of nationality — in Ireland, in East Europe and 
elsewhere. But that is only an accident. To allow govern- 
ments to exploit for political ends the huge inarticulate 
emotional driving force of either religion or nationality is 
to open the floodgates. Hence the wars of religion in the 
Seventeenth Century and the nationalist hatreds of the 
present war. 

Alfred Zimmern says : 

"It seems strange that there should be Americans who 
still hold firmly to the old-fashioned view of what I can 
only call instantaneous conversion, of the desirability and 
possibility of the immigrant shedding his whole ancestral 
inheritance and flinging himself into the melting-pot of 
transatlantic life to emerge into a clean white American 
soul of the brand approved by the Pilgrim Fathers. Now 
the only way to teach immigrants how to become good 
Americans, that is to say, how to be good in America, is 
by appealing to that in them which made them good in 
Croatia, or Bohemia, or Poland, or wherever they came 
from. And by far the best and the most useful leverage 
for this purpose is the appeal to nationality: because na- 
tionality is more than a creed or a doctrine or a code of 
conduct, it is an instinctive attachment." 

The road to sound Internationalism, to an un- 
derstanding between States, lies "through National- 
ism, not through leveling men down to a gray, in- 



THE HYPHENATES 145 

distinctive Cosmopolitanism but by appealing to the 
best elements in the corporate inheritance of each 
nation." True democracy wishes to use the best 
that is in men in all their infinite diversity, not to 
melt away their difference into one economic man. 
The American passion for uniformity, for creating 
a "snappy," efficient, undifferentiated type, is merely 
the local and recent form of the rigid aristocratic 
desire to "Christianize" the Jew, to Anglicize Ire- 
land, to modernize the Hindu. It is the wish to 
make man in our own image. It is the last bad 
relic of the missionary zeal which conducted the 
Inquisition. It is only subtler and more dangerous, 
because persecution called out hidden powers of re- 
sistance, but triumphant Commercialism, as engi- 
neered by our industrial oligarchy, calls out imi- 
tation. 

I have a collection of photographs made at Ellis 
Island by Julian Dimock. They are subjects chosen 
almost at random from the stream of newcomers on 
the morning of ship-arrival. There is often some- 
thing very touching in the expression of these faces : 
a trust in the goodness of life, in the goodness of 
human nature. Man and woman and youth, they 
seem to carry something that has been won by long 
generations of rooted life and passed on to them 
for safe-keeping. And suddenly at the landing in 
the new world the tradition is touched to a dream 
of hope. But that light never lasts for long. Watch 



146 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

those same newcomers as they are disgorged from 
our city factories. How soon the light goes out of 
their faces, the inhabiting spirit withdrawn to its 
own inaccessible home. Something brisk and natty 
and pert replaces that unconscious dignity. Some- 
thing tired from unceasing surface stimulus takes 
possession of what was fresh and innocent in open 
peasant life and the friendly intercourse of neigh- 
bors. 

These races, in their weakness and poverty, have 
been unable to swing back to their own deep center 
of consciousness. Unaided, it is doubtful if they 
will ever raise their buried life from its sleep. The 
Jewish nation is the only dispersion among us which 
has gathered its will and recovered its self -conscious- 
ness enough to give us any promising movement. 
They are slowly recognizing what is being done to 
their young. They begin to see that their nation 
is losing its one priceless jewel, the possession of 
spiritual insight. In the movement which is spread- 
ing through the day schools for teaching young 
Jews the great ethical tradition of their people, in 
their educational alliances, in the Menorah Asso- 
ciation, in the Zionist Movement, in the writings 
of Brandeis, Kallen and Bourne, they are showing 
the first glimmerings of statesmanship and making 
the first application of intelligence to our commer- 
cialized cosmopolitan materialistic country which 
we have had since we passed on from "Anglo-Saxon" 



THE HYPHENATES 147 

Protestant civilization. May their grip on their 
nationality never grow less. May the clear pro- 
gram which they have constructed against the drift 
and rush of our careless life seize the imagination 
of Italian and Serb and Bohemian. So and no 
otherwise, we shall at last have a spiritual basis 
for our civilization. 

Frank acceptance of the fact of dual nationality 
leads to such clear statement as Randolph Bourne 
has given us in The Menorah Journal for Decem- 
ber, 1916. He shows the fallacy of the "melting 
pot" idea, which attempts to knead the whole popu- 
lation into an undefined colorless mass, labeled 
American. In place of that undesirable and absurd 
consummation, he offers a cooperation of cultures. 
"America has become a vast reservoir of disper- 
sions," and Cooperative Americanism will meet "the 
demands of the foreign immigre who wishes free- 
dom to preserve his heritage at the same time that 
he cooperates loyally with all other nationals in the 
building up of America." 

What is Cooperative Americanism? Mr. Bourne 
answers that it is "an ideal of a freely mingling 
society of peoples of very different racial and cul- 
tural antecedents, with a common political alle- 
giance and common social ends, but with free and 
distinctive cultural allegiances which may be 
placed anywhere in the world that they like. If 
the Jews have been the first international race, I 



148 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

look to America to be the first international 
nation." 

Now, there is no unpopularity to-day in lauding 
a Jew or a Greek or an Irishman. May I go a step 
further, and say that the same freedom to express 
the tradition within them must be extended to the 
Americans of the old stock, even those who hold a 
grateful love for France (some of them recently 
have died for that), even those who love England 
for her long struggle for political liberty. I cannot 
feel that Agnes Repplier, Lyman Abbott, George 
Haven Putnam and the American Rights League 
are deserving of a certain fine intellectual scorn 
which Randolph Bourne and Max Eastman have 
applied to them. The American Rights League is 
entitled to the same open field and the same respect 
which the Menorah Society should receive. Why 
does Mr. Bourne applaud the one and lash the 
other"? I trust he will welcome both. What I think 
Bourne, James Oppenheim, Walter Lippmann and 
Max Eastman have failed to see is that the old 
American stock (of diverse race but common tradi- 
tion) had a right to respond vigorously to this war, 
where their inheritance of social, legal and political 
ideas were battling with hostile ideas. Somewhere, 
at some point, the new American tradition must 
plant itself. In some issue it must take root. We 
of the old stock sought to make this war the issue. 
We failed. All right. It is now your turn. In the 



THE HYPHENATES 149 

open arena of discussion the ideas of all of us must 
collide into harmony. I can make clear the difficulty 
one has in reaffirming the old American idea by quot- 
ing from the letter of an American editor in response 
to what the chapters of this book are stating : 

"It seems so curiously out of focus in its estimation of 
the Old, the vanishing, America. Do you really believe 
that Old America should be raised from the dead: — The 
America of convenient transcendentalism where religion 
allowed a whole race to devote its body and spirit to ma- 
terial aggrandizement? If you blame America for Chris- 
tian Science optimism, you must remember that Emerson 
and Whitman were our teachers. If you blame America 
for not taking part in the European war, you must re- 
member that Washington told us to keep out of 'entangling 
alliances.' It is historic America that was grossly material, 
out of which our vast industrialism sprang with its im- 
portation of cheap labor. But the Garden of Eden always 
lies behind us, and nothing is commoner than finding 
Paradise in the past." 

What I have tried to say is that the tradition of 
a nation is not a dead thing, locked in the past. It 
is a living thing, operating on the present. A tradi- 
tion is a shared experience, governing present life. 
The State needs to cohere and find itself and estab- 
lish a cultural consciousness, blended from manifold 
contributions. It is destructive to have new swirl- 
ing elements ceaselessly driving through the mass. 
So I have protested against the too ready and ruth- 
less discarding of the cultural consciousness be- 
queathed us by the older American stock. While the 



ISO OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

ideas imbedded in that consciousness will never again 
be in sole command, I believe that they should be 
more potent than they are to-day. I believe that 
politically they have a living value for us, and that 
we persistently underestimate the English contribu- 
tion to freedom and justice. I deny that my desire 
that these ideas shall prevail is an attempt to locate 
the Garden of Eden and Paradise in the smoky 
past. It is, instead, the wish to see our country 
appropriate a particular political contribution from 
the English stock, exactly as it needs to appropriate 
certain social values from the Italians and the 
Greeks, and many very definite spiritual ideas from 
the culture of the Jews. 

What is the solution of these diverse elements? 
What blend can we obtain from a score of mixtures *? 
How fashion a civilization that shall absorb and 
assimilate those blood-strains and traditional be- 
liefs ? I think the one clear answer lies in the crea- 
tion of free institutions, which shall answer a com- 
mon need, and which shall violate the instinctive 
life and traditions of none. Those free institutions 
will be the product of education, legislation, Co- 
operation, Trades Unionism and Syndicalism, 
municipal and State ownership, and widely spread 
private ownership and enterprise. The organized 
State under democratic control will be the thing 
aimed at. But these free institutions must gradu- 
ally extend over areas far wider than vocational 



THE HYPHENATES 150a 

training and economic well-being. They should 
seek to offer free expression to the fully-functioning 
mind in art, science, ethics and religion. In this 
way they will give a good life. We have the 
shadowy beginnings of such institutions in the pub- 
lic school and library. But we have nothing like 
the Danish or English cooperative movement. Our 
institution of property affords us nothing like the 
peasant proprietorship of Ireland. 

No apter illustration of how little we have tackled 
our job can be found than in American Socialism. 
There is no American Socialism. Orthodox social- 
ism in America is dead doctrine, brought across by 
German and Russian revolutionaries, reacting on 
their peculiar environment, and then exhumed in a 
new country. Meanwhile a great vital movement 
toward democratic control goes on in Europe, in 
Trades Unionism, Cooperation and municipal and 
State ownership. Our socialist locals repeat f ormulse 
which Shaw, the Webbs, Rowntree, Wallas, Kaut- 
sky, Vandervelde and Herve outgrew a generation 
ago. It is here I hold that the old American stock 
can do a service in interpreting American conditions 
to our recent arrivals. 

But if we continue to leave the door open we 
shall continue to be swamped, and we shall employ 
our little hasty ready-made devices for turning peas- 
ants with a thousand years of inherited characteris- 
tics into citizens. We shatter them against our en- 



150b OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

vironment, and then are astonished that their 
thwarted instincts, trained to another world, revenge 
themselves in political corruption, abnormal vices, 
and murderous "gunman" activities. Psychologists 
like Ross warn us in vain. 

These overlapping hordes of "aliens" destroy the 
economic basis on which alone free institutions can 
be reared. People, to whom we cannot afford to 
pay a living wage, or for whom we do not care to 
arrange a living wage, will not help us in creating 
free institutions. Instead, they are manipulated by 
the industrial oligarchy into a force for breaking 
down the standard of living of all workers. A reso- 
lute restriction of immigration is not a discrimina- 
tion against any race. It is the first step toward 
unlocking the capacities of the races already among 
us. The reason for stopping immigration, then, is 
economic. It rests in the fact that our wage-scale 
and standard of living are being shot to pieces by 
the newcomers. As the result our existent institu- 
tions are not developing in liberal directions, and 
we are failing to create new free institutions. It 
requires a somewhat stable population, and a fairly 
uniform economic basis to create a Cooperative 
movement, like that in Ireland, or a Trade Union 
movement, like that in Australia. 

Slowly the new order is coming, the day of the 
Commonwealth of nationalities, where men from 
many lands, drawing their spiritual reserves from 



THE HYPHENATES 150c 

the home that nourished their line through the long 
generations, will yet render loyal citizenship to the 
new State which harbors them and gives them a good 
life. The task of America is to create that Com- 
monwealth, that entity which men gladly serve, 
and for which at need they willingly die. Our poli- 
tics have not yet held that appeal. Not yet can an 
American of these recent years stand off from the 
stream of his experience, saying, "What does it 
mean that I am an American*?" and answer it in the 
high terms which a Frenchman can use. Fifty years 
ago the American could answer in fairly definite 
terms. But does our recent history mean much to 
Czech or Russian Jew or Calabrian who has settled 
among us ? It does not. The stirring of their blood 
responds to another history than ours. Shall we 
take away their tradition from them 4 ? We cannot 
if we would. What we can do with their help is 
to create free institutions which will win them to a 
new allegiance, and this will slowly root itself in 
the fiber of their line. 

For a few generations they will continue at time 
of stress to hear the call of their old home, as a bird 
in the autumn takes the call of the South. The 
Serb will return to his mountains when the battle- 
line is drawn, as he returned five years ago. The 
German will go back to his barracks when Russia 
begins to spread toward the West. And over those 
that do not go back a great restlessness will come, 



i5od OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

and they will torment themselves, like a caged bird 
in the month of flight. But with each generation 
the call will grow fainter, till finally the old tra- 
dition is subdued and the citizen is domesticated. 
In this way only can the new allegiance and in«- 
stinctive sense of nationality be created, growing 
very gradually out of free institutions. 

Out of free institutions in State, property, re- 
ligion and marriage, ever-developing to fit a de- 
veloping people; out of the unfolding process of 
law, escaping from legalism and applying psychol- 
ogy to human relationship; out of an education, 
sanctioned by human interest, and devoted not only 
to vocational training but to the sense of beauty 
and wonder; out of vast movements of the mass- 
people toward democratic control; there will some 
day grow the new American tradition, which in the 
fullness of time will take possession of the heart 
of these diverse races and clashing nationalities. It 
will not root itself and grow in the years of "natu- 
ralization," nor yet in one or two generations. But 
in a hundred or two hundred years it will coalesce 
infinitely repellant particles and gently conquer 
antagonisms, and in that day, which not even our 
children's children will see, there will at last emerge 
the American Commonwealth. 



VI 



THE REMEDY 



I HAVE made out the best case I can for our 
people. These chapters have listed every ex- 
cuse that can reasonably be given for our fail- 
ure to declare ourselves on the moral issue of this 
war. They have said that a careless, busy folk, like 
those of the Middle West, need many facts to 
enable them to see where the truth lies. They have 
pointed out how short-sighted is the foreign pol- 
icy of the Allies which gives few facts to the Amer- 
ican public. They have shown how the best of 
our radicals have failed to think clearly because 
they have been befuddled by a vague pseudo-inter- 
nationalism. I have stated what I believe to be the 
falsity in our present-day conception of Europe, the 
self-complacency in our monopoly of freedom and 
justice; and I have tried to reveal how that assump- 
tion of merit blinded our eyes to the struggles of 
other peoples for the same causes. I have blamed 
our failure on Germany and on England. But 
after every explanation has been made, it is still 

151 



152 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

true that our people ought to have been sensitive. 
At a great moment of history we failed of great- 
ness. There remains a shame to us that we held 
aloof. There was no organized campaign of facts 
needed to convince France that we were fighting 
for human rights in our Revolution. Three thou- 
sand miles of water did not drown the appeal of 
our extremity. But to-day our leaders are so be- 
wildered by dreams of universal brotherhood that 
they overlook our blood-brother on the Marne. Our 
common people have their eyes to their work, and 
do not look up, as the workers of Lancashire looked 
up with cheer and sympathy when we rocked in the 
balance of 1863. 

This war has shown to us that we are not at the 
level of earlier days. We have lost our national 
unity, our sense of direction. The war has revealed 
in us an unpreparedness in foreign and domestic pol- 
icy. It is a curse to know one's weakness unless one 
cures it. So this war will not leave us blessed until 
we take a program of action. It is a waste of 
time to write a book on the war except to convince 
and move to action. 

The steps are clear. 

Our first step is to set our house in order. We 
need to recover our self-consciousness, to restate 
what we mean by America. A half million new- 
comers each year will not help us to find ourselves. 



THE REMEDY 153 

We shall be the better friends of freedom if we 
digest our present welter. Let us fearlessly and 
at once advocate a stringent restriction of immigra- 
tion. Our citizenship has become somewhat cheap. 
Our ideals have become somewhat mixed. Let us 
take time to locate the direction in which we wish 
to go, and decide on the goal at which we aim. 
"Thou, Oh ! my country, must forever endure," said 
a famous patriot ; but in a few years his country had 
been melted down into an autocracy. We cannot 
rely for all time on luck and happy drift. Size, num- 
bers, the physical economic conquest of a continent 
— these are not a final good. They are at best only 
means toward worthy living. It is easier to rush 
in fresh masses of cheap labor than it is to deal 
with the workers already here as members of a 
free community, aid them in winning a high standard 
of living, and establish with them an industrial 
democracy. The cheapest way of digging our 
ditches and working our factories, and sewing our 
shirts, is of course to continue holding open our flood 
gates and letting the deluge come. It is the clever 
policy of our exploiters, and the sentimental policy 
of the rest of us who love to be let alone, if only 
we can cover our unconcern with a humanitarian 
varnish. But the result of it is the America of to- 
day with its oligarchy of industrial captains and 
bankers, with its aristocracy of labor, made up of 



154 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

powerful trades unions and restricted "Brother- 
hoods," and with its unskilled alien masses of mine 
and factory labor, unorganized, exploited. Let us 
begin to build the better America by sacrificing the 
easy immediate benefits of unrestricted immigration. 
Our second step is to teach our tradition to the 
hundred million already here. It is a large enough 
classroom. We can advertise for new pupils when 
our present group matriculates. When it has 
matriculated, there will be no popularity for phrases 
like "He kept us out of war," nor for songs of "I 
didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." The teaching 
of that tradition will reveal the interweaving of the 
American and the French Revolutions as products 
of a single impulse toward world liberation. If we 
had known our history, we should have answered 
the need of France, as Hall, Chapman, Thaw, 
Seeger, and many more answered it who have laid 
down their lives for their friend, France. The 
teaching of the American tradition will reveal to 
our awakened astonished minds that our policy has 
not been that of neutrality toward oppressed peo- 
ples like the Belgians. It will reveal that the Brit- 
ish fleet has served us well from the time of Can- 
ning down to Manila Bay. It will stir in us loyal- 
ties that have long been asleep. It will show what 
a phrase like "Government for the people" has 
meant in terms of social legislation. It will point 



THE REMEDY 155 

to the long road we must tread before we reach that 
ideal goal. We cannot leave the teaching of our 
tradition to the public schools alone. Courses of 
evening lectures for the people, the newspapers and 
periodicals, clergymen and economists and social 
workers, all must help. 

Our third step is a deep understanding sympathy 
with the forces in the world making for righteous- 
ness. We should have been sensitive enough to see 
the right and the wrong of the present war. But 
that chance has gone by. Let us now make ready 
to contribute to the future. The fundamental ques- 
tion is this: Are the democracies of the world to 
stand together, or is the world-fight for freedom to 
be made, with our nation on the side-lines'? The 
whole emphasis of the world's emotion has shifted 
from war to peace. When thought follows this emo- 
tion and rationalizes it, we can begin constructive 
work. The test of our desire for peace will be found 
in this: Do we mean business 4 ? Pacifism is value- 
less, because it is a vague emotion. Peace is a thing 
won by thought and effort. It is not alone a "state 
of mind." If we are willing to give guarantees by 
army and navy, and to back up protest by force, 
we can serve the cause of peace. But if we continue 
our "internationalism" of recent years, we shall not 
be admitted to any such effective league of peace 
as France and England will form. We must take 



156 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

our place by the side of the nations who mean to 
make freedom and justice prevail throughout the 
world. 

Our fourth step will be that measure of prepared- 
ness which will render us effective in playing our 
part in world history. We cannot go on forever 
asking the English fleet to supply the missing mem- 
bers in our Monroe Doctrine. We cannot go on 
forever developing a rich ripeness, trusting that no 
hand will pluck us. In a competitive world, which 
builds Krupp guns, we cannot place our sole reliance 
in a good-nature which will be touched to friendli- 
ness because we are a special people. That pre- 
paredness will not stop with enriching munition 
makers, and playing into the hands of Eastern bank- 
ers. It will be a preparedness which enlists labor, 
by safeguarding wages and hours. It is the pre- 
paredness of an ever-encroaching equality: a de- 
mocracy of free citizens, prosperous not in spots but 
in a wide commonalty, disciplined not only by na- 
tional service of arms, but by the fundamental dis- 
cipline of an active effective citizenship. It is a pre- 
paredness which will call on the women to share 
the burden of citizenship. It is a preparedness 
which mobilizes all the inner forces of a nation by 
clearing the ground for equality. It will be a pre- 
paredness not against an evil day, but for the fur- 
therance of the great hopes of the race. 



SECTION III 

THE GERMANS THAT ROSE FROM THE 

DEAD 



LORD BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS 

IN presenting the facts that follow of the be- 
havior of the German Army, I am fortunate 
in being able to introduce them with a state- 
ment written for me by Lord Bryce. The words 
of Lord Bryce carry more weight with the American 
people than those of any other man in Europe, and 
his analysis of the methods of the German Staff is 
authoritative, because he was the Chairman of what 
is known as the "Bryce Committee," which issued 
the famous report on German "frightfulness." 
When I told him that our country would respond 
to a statement from him, he asked me to submit 
questions, and to these questions he has written an- 
swers. 

The first question submitted to Viscount Bryce 
was this: 

"America has been startled by Cardinal Mer- 
cier's statement concerning the deportation of Bel- 
gian men. Our people will appreciate a statement 
from you as to the meaning of this latest German 



159 



160 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Lord Bryce replied to me : 

"Nothing could be more shocking than this whole- 
sale carrying away of men from Belgium. I know 
of no case in European history to surpass it. Not 
even in the Thirty Years War were there such 
things as the German Government has done, first 
and last in Belgium. This last case is virtual 
slavery. The act is like that of those Arab slave 
raiders in Africa who carried off negroes to the coast 
to sell. And the severity is enhanced because these 
Belgians and the work forcibly extracted from them 
are going to be used against their own people. Hav- 
ing invaded Belgium, and murdered many hundreds, 
indeed even thousands, among them women and 
children, who could not be accused of 'sniping,' the 
German military government dislocated the indus- 
trial system of the community. They carried off 
all the raw materials of industry and most of the 
machinery in factories, and then having thus de- 
prived the inhabitants of work, the invaders used 
this unemployment as the pretext for deporting 
them in very large numbers to places where nothing 
will be known of their fate. They were not even 
allowed to take leave of their wives and children. 
Many of them may never be heard of again. And 
von Bissing calls this £ a humanitarian measure.' 
Actually, it is all a part of the invasion policy. They 
defend it as being 'war,' as they justify everything, 



BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS 161 

however inhuman, done because the military needs 
of Germany are alleged to call for it. It shows 
how hard pressed the military power is beginning 
to find itself at this latest stage of the war. It is 
said that Attila, when he was bringing his hosts of 
Huns out of Asia for his great assault on Western 
Europe, forced the conquered tribes into his army, 
and made them a part of his invasion. I can hardly 
think of a like case since then. In principle it re- 
sembles the Turkish plan when they formed the 
Janissaries. The Turks used their Christian sub- 
jects, taken quite young and made Moslems, and 
enrolled them as soldiers (to fight against Chris- 
tians) to fill their armies, of which they were the 
most efficient part. These Belgians are not indeed 
actually made to fight, but they are being forced 
to do the labor of war, some of them probably dig- 
ging trenches, or making shells, or working in quar- 
ries to extract chalk to make cement for war pur- 
poses. The carrying off of young girls from Lille 
was terrible enough, and it seemed to us at the time 
that nothing could be worse. But the taking away 
of many thousand of the Belgian population from 
their homes to work against their own countrymen, 
with all the mental torture that separation from 
one's family brings — this is the most shocking thing 
we have yet heard of. I have been shown in confi- 
dence the reports received from Belgium of what 



162 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

has happened there. The details given and the 
sources they come from satisfied me of their sub- 
stantial truth. The very excuses the German au- 
thorities are putting forward admit the facts. In 
Belgian Luxemburg I hear that they have been try- 
ing to stop the existing employment in order to have 
an excuse for taking off the men." 

The second question read: 

"How are such acts of German severity to be ac- 
counted for?" 

Lord Bryce replied : 

"When the early accounts of the atrocious con- 
duct of the German Government in Belgium were 
laid before the Committee over which I presided 
they seemed hardly credible. But when we sifted 
them, going carefully through every case, and re- 
jecting all those that seemed doubtful, we found 
such a mass of concurrent testimony coming from 
different sources, and carefully tested by the law- 
yers who examined the witnesses, that we could not 
doubt that the facts which remained were beyond 
question. You ask how German officers came to 
give such orders. The Committee tried to answer 
that question in a passage of their report. They 
point out that for the German officer caste morality 
and right stop when war begins. The German 
Chancellor admitted that they had done wrong in 
invading Belgium, but they would go on and hack 



BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS 163 

their way through. The German military class had 
brooded so long on war that their minds had be- 
come morbid. To Prussian officers war has become, 
when the interests of the State require it, a sort of 
sacred mission: everything may be done by and for 
the omnipotent State. Pity and morality vanish, 
and are superseded by the new standard justifying 
every means that conduces to success. 'This,' said 
the Committee, 'is a specifically military doctrine, 
the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who 
have brooded and thought, written and talked and 
dreamed about war until they have fallen under its 
obsession and been hypnotized by its spirit.' You 
will find these doctrines set forth in 'Kriegsbrauch 
im Landkriege,' the German Official Monograph on 
the usages of war on land, issued under the direc- 
tion of the German Staff. What military needs sug- 
gest becomes lawful. You will find in that book a 
justification for everything the German Army has 
done, for seizing hostages, i. e., innocent inhabitants 
of an invaded area, and shooting them if necessary. 
You will find what amounts to a justification even 
of assassination. The German soldiers' diaries cap- 
tured on prisoners offer the proof that the German 
officers acted upon this principle. 'This is not the 
only case that history records in which a false theory, 
disguising itself as loyalty to a State or a Church, 
has perverted the conception of Duty, and become 



164 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

a source of danger to the world.' This doctrine 
spread outside military circles. I do not venture 
to say that it has infected anything like the whole 
people. I hope that it did not. But national pride 
and national vanity were enlisted, and it became a 
widespread doctrine accepted by the military and 
even by many civilians. The Prussians are far more 
penetrated by the military spirit than the Americans 
or English or French, and such a doctrine minis- 
tered to the greatness of the power of Prussia. It 
was part of Prussian military theory and sometimes 
of practice a century ago. But in the rest of Ger- 
many it is a new thing. There was nothing of the 
kind in southern Germany when I knew it fifty years 
ago. 

"In an army there will be individual cases of hor- 
rible brutality — plunder, rape, ill-treatment of ci- 
vilians. There will always be men of criminal in- 
stinct whose passion is loosed by the immunities of 
war conditions. Drunkenness, moreover, may turn 
a decent soldier into a wild beast. But most of 
the crimes committed in Belgium were not commit- 
ted by drunken troops. The German peasant, the 
'Hans' whom we know, is a good, simple, kindly 
sort of fellow, as are the rural folk in every country. 
But remember in the German army there is a habit 
of implicit obedience. The officers are extremely 
severe in military discipline. They will shoot read- 



BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS 165 

ily for a minor infraction. It is the officers more 
than the private soldiers that were to blame. And 
some of the officers were shocked by what they were 
forced to do. T am merely executing orders and I 
should be punished if I did not execute them,' said 
more than one officer whose words were recorded. 
How can an officer in war time disobey the orders 
of the supreme military command? He would be 
shot, and if he were to say he could not remain in 
an army where he was expected to commit crimes, 
to retire in war time, if he were permitted to retire, 
would mean disgrace to his name. It is the spirit 
of the Higher German Army Command that is to 
blame. The authority that issued the orders is 
guilty. The German people as a whole are not 
cruel, but many of them have been infected by this 
war spirit. 

"And we little realize how strict is the German 
censorship. The German people have been fed with 
falsehoods. So far are they from believing in the 
record of their own army's cruelties, that they have 
been made to believe in cruelties alleged to have 
been committed by French and English troops. They 
have been fed on stories of soldiers with their eyes 
put out by Belgians. The Chancellor of the Ger- 
man Empire in a press communication said : 

"Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of the Ger- 
man wounded. Officials of Belgian cities have in- 



166 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

vited our officers to dinner and shot and killed them 
across the table. Contrary to all international law, 
the whole civilian population of Belgium was called 
out, and after having at first shown friendliness, car- 
ried on in the rear of our troops terrible warfare with 
concealed weapons. Belgian women cut the throats 
of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes 
while they were sleeping." 

"There was no truth at all in these stories." 
The next question was submitted as follows : 
"Has the German Government made any effort to 
prove their general charges and to disprove the de- 
tailed charges of your report and the report made 
by the French Government?" 
Lord Bryce writes in reply : 

"The diaries of German soldiers referred to have 
been published throughout the world, and no ques- 
tion has been raised of their authenticity. They con- 
tain testimony to outrages committed in Belgium 
and France that is overwhelming. No answer is 
possible. The German Government have never 
made a reply to the Report of the British Committee. 
They attempted to answer some of the reports made 
by the Belgian Government. But their answer was 
really an admission to the facts, for it consisted in 
allegations that Belgian civilians had given provoca- 
tion. They endeavored to prove that Belgian ci- 
vilians had shot at them. It would not have been 



BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS 167 

strange if some civilians had shot at those who sud- 
denly burst into their country, but no proof has 
ever been given of more than a few of such cases, 
nor of the stories of outrages committed by Bel- 
gian priests, women and children on German sol- 
diers. Even if such occasional shooting by civilians 
had taken place, as very likely it did, that did not 
justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent persons 
and the burning of whole villages. In the burning 
of the 26 houses at Melle, which you tell me you 
witnessed, no allegations were made of shooting by 
civilians. The little girl murdered at Alost, to whom 
you refer, had not shot at the Germans. The 
woman, eighty years old, had not shot at them. 
These severities were committed as a method to 
achieve an end. That end was to terrorize the 
civilian population, and destroy the spiritual re- 
sources of the nation." 

The final question was this: 

"As the result of this war, what hope have we 
of reconstruction and an altered policy in Ger- 
many?" 

Viscount Bryce answered : 

"It is to be hoped and expected that the Allies will 
so completely defeat Germany as to discredit the 
whole military system and the ideas out of which 
the horrors of German war practice have developed. 
It is essential to inflict a defeat sufficiently decisive 



i68 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

in the eyes of the German people that they will have 
done with their military caste and its nefarious doc- 
trine, and it is essential to discredit the methods 
themselves — discredit them by their failure — in so 
thorough a manner that no nation will ever use them 
again. The way, then, of ending what is called 
'frightfulness' is by a complete victory over it. It 
is our task to show that shocking military practices 
and total disregard of right do not succeed. We 
must bring to pass the judgment of facts to the ef- 
fect that such methods do not avail. In this deter- 
mination our British people are unanimous as they 
have never been before. The invasion of Belgium, 
the atrocities committed there, and the sinking of 
the Lusitania — these three series of acts united the 
whole British people in its firm resolve to prosecute 
the war to a complete victory. Now on the top of 
these things and of isolated crimes of the German 
Government, like the shooting of Miss Cavell and 
Captain Fryatt, come these abominable deportations 
of Belgians into a sort of slavery." 

In all communication with Lord Bryce, one feels 
the accurate fair-minded scholar. He is without heat 
and partisanship. He added in a note : 

"We know that our British soldiers fight hard, 
but they fight fair, and they have no personal hatred 
to their enemies. I have been at the British front 
and have seen their spirit. I was told that our men 



BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS 169 

when they take a prisoner often clap him on the 
back and give him a cigarette. There is no personal 
hatred among our officers or men. Efforts are prop- 
erly made here at home to keep bitterness against the 
German people as a whole from the minds of our 
people, but it is right that they should detest and 
do their utmost to overthrow the system that has 
produced this war and has made it so horrible." 



II 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 

I HAVE seen the original diaries of the German 
soldiers in the army which devastated Belgium 
and Northern France. Things tumble out just 
as they happened, hideous acts, unedited thoughts. 
Phillips Brooke once spoke of the sensation there 
would be if the contents of our minds were dumped 
on Boston Common for people to see. Here is the 
soul of the German people spilled out into writing. 
This is what Germany was in the year 1914. This 
record left by dead men and by captured men is a 
very living thing to me, because I saw these Ger- 
man soldiers at their work of burning and torture. 
Here they have themselves told of doing the very 
thing I saw them do. We must not miss the point 
of their proof, written and signed by the perpe- 
trators themselves. It is the proof of systematic 
massacre, systematic pillage, systematic arson. 

These diaries found on the field of battle were 
brought to the French General Staff along with the 
arms and equipments of the dead and the prisoners. 

170 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 171 

They are written by the soldiers because of Article 
75 of the German Instruction for Campaign Service 
(Felddienst-Ordnung), which states that "these 
journals of war serve for information on the general 
operations, and, by bringing together the various re- 
ports of active fighting, they are the basis for the 
later definitive histories of the campaigns. They 
should be kept daily." No words could be more ex- 
actly prophetic. Those diaries will be the basis of 
all future histories of the war. The keeping of them 
is obligatory for the officers, and seems to be volun- 
tary on the part of the men, but with a measure 
of implied requirement. So stern did some of the 
soldiers feel the military requirement to be that they 
kept on with their record up to the point of death. 
Here is the diary of a soldier of the Fourth Com- 
pany of the Tenth Battalion of Light Infantry Re- 
serves, which he was writing at the moment he was 
fatally wounded. 

'Teh bin verwundet. Behute dich Gott. Kiisse 
das Kind. Es soil fromm sein." And then the pen- 
cil stops forever. The writing on that final page 
of all is regular and firm up to the "Ich bin ver- 
wundet," Those last four sentences are each just 
a line long, as if each was a cry. He wrote the 
word "Kiisse" and could hardly rally himself. His 
pencil slips into three marks without meaning, then 
he writes "das Kind." I trust my German readers 



172 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

will not deny me the use of this diary. It is the 
only one of which I have not seen the original. The 
photographic reproduction is my only evidence of 
this flash of tenderness among a thousand acts of 
infamy. 

The diaries are little black-covered pocket copy- 
books: the sort that women in our country use for 
the family accounts. They contain about 100 pages. 
They average five inches in length and three in 
width. A few of the diaries, and those mostly be- 
longing to officers, are written in ink. But most 
of them are in pencil, occasionally in black, but the 
large majority in purple. 

Many of the diaries are curt records of daily 
marches and military operations. The man is too 
tired to write anything but distances, names of 
places, engagements. That was what the Great Ger- 
man General Staff had in mind in ordering the prac- 
tice. They could not foresee what would slip 
through into the record, because in all their calcula- 
tions they have always forgotten the human spirit. 
Once again we are indebted to German thorough- 
ness. The causes, the objects, the methods of this 
war, will not be in doubt, as in other wars of the 
past. History will be clear in dealing its judg- 
ments. Like the surgeon's ray on a fester, German 
light has played on the sore spots. So the soldiers 
have gone on making their naked records of crimes 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 173 

committed and their naive mental reactions on what 
they did, till all too late the German machine for- 
bade further exposure of the national soul. But the 
faithful peasant fingers had written what all eternity 
cannot annul. 

"These booklets, stained, bruised, sometimes per- 
forated by bayonet or torn by splinters of shell, the 
pencilings in haste, day by day, in spite of fatigue, 
in spite even of wounds" — they are the most human 
documents of the war. 

This privilege of working with the originals them- 
selves was extended by the Ministry of War. The 
General Staff issued a Laissez-Passer, and gave me 
an introduction to the fine white-haired old Lieu- 
tenant, who is a Russian and German scholar. To- 
gether we went word by word over the booklets. I 
was impressed by the fair-minded attitude of my co- 
worker. "An honest man," he said, when we came 
to Harlak's record. "Un brave soldat," he declared 
of the old reservist, who protested against murder. 
He was not trying to make a case. He had no need 
to make a case. The pity of it is that the case 
has been so thoroughly made by German hands. 
These diaries have not been doctored in the smallest 
detail. There they are, as they were taken from 
the body of the dead man and the pocket of the 
prisoners. The room where we worked is stuffed 
with the booklets of German soldiers. Shelves are 



174 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

lined with the black-bound diaries and the little red 
books of identification carried by each soldier. They 
overflow upon tables. In this room and a suite ad- 
joining sit the official translators of the French Gen- 
eral Staff. I have purposely selected certain of my 
examples from the official reports of the French Gov- 
ernment. I wanted to verify for American "neu- 
trals" that no slightest word had been altered, that 
no insertions had been made. 

My first diary was that of a Saxon officer of the 
Eighth Company, of the 1 78th Regiment, of the XII 
Army Corps. He makes his entry for 26 August, 
1914. 

"The lovely village of Gue-d'Hossus, apparently 
entirely innocent, has been given to the flames. A 
cyclist is said to have fallen from his machine, and 
in so doing his rifle was discharged, so they fired at 
him. Accordingly the male inhabitants were cast 
into the flames. Such atrocities are not to happen 
again, one hopes." 

The German phrases carry the writer's sense of 
outrage: "Das wunderschone Dorf Gue-d'Hossus 
soil ganz unschuldig in Flammen gegangen sein. 
. . . Man hat mannliche Einwohner einfach in die 
Flammen geworfen. Solche Scheusslichkeiten Kom- 
men hoffentlich nich wieder vor." 

He adds: "At Laffe, about 200 men have been 
shot. There it was an example for the place; it was 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 175 

inevitable for the innocent to suffer. Even so there 
ought to be a verification of mere suspicions of guilt 
before aiming a fusillade at everybody." 

In the village of Bouvignes on August 23, 1914, 
he and his men entered a private home. 

"There on the floor was the body of the owner. 
In the interior our men had destroyed everything 
exactly like vandals. . . . The sight of the in- 
habitants of the village who had been shot beggars 
any descriptions. The volley had nearly decapitated 
certain of them. Every house to the last corner had 
been searched and so the inhabitants brought out 
from their hiding-places. The men were shot. The 
women and children put in the convent. From this 
convent shooting has come, so the convent will be 
burned. Only through the giving up of the guilty 
and the paying of 15,000 francs can it save itself." 

The German phrases of f rightfulness have a sound 
that matches their meaning : 

"Hatten unsere Leute bereits wie die Vandalen 
gehaust." "Manner erschossen." 

I opened the diary of Private Hassemer of the 
VIII Corps, and in the entry at Sommepy (in the 
district of the Marne) for September 3, 1914, 1 read : 

"3/9 1914. Ein schreckliches Blutbad, Dorf 
abgebrannt, die Franzosen in die brennenden 
Hauser geworfen, Zivilpersonen alles mitverbrandt." 

("A hideous bloodbath (massacre), the village 



176 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

totally burned, the French hurled into the burning 
houses, civilians, everybody, burned together.") 

An unsuspected brutality is here revealed. To 
these men a peasant of another race is not a father 
and husband and man. He is as a dog. He is 
"Auslander," beyond the pale — a thing to be chased 
with bayonets and burned with fire, to the rollicking 
amusement of brave soldiers. Back of the slaughter 
lies the basic idea of a biological superiority in the 
German people, a belief that their duty calls them 
to a sacred war to dominate other races, and create 
a greater Germany. They think they are a higher 
order of beings, who can kill creatures of a lesser 
breed, as one slays the lower order of animals in 
the march of progress. Other races have had dreams 
of grandeur, but never so mad a dream, so colossal 
in its designs on world dominion, so cruel in its 
methods of achieving that supremacy. 

Soldat Wilhelm Schellenberg, of 106 Reserve In- 
fantry of the XII Reserve Army Corps, gives his 
home as Groitzsch bei Leipzig, "am Bahnhof," first 
floor, number 8. "Frau Martha Schellenberg" is to 
be notified. His diary is innocent. 

I held in my hands the diary of Erich Harlak of 
the II Company, 38 Fusilier Regiment of the Sixth 
Army Corps. There is a cut through the cover and 
pages of the pamphlet — probably the stab of a bayo- 
net. Harlak is a Silesian. On the first page he 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 177 

writes in German "Bitte dieses Buch gutigst meinen 
Eltern zusenden zu wollen." Then in French "Je 
prie aussi Les Francais de rendre, s'il vous plait, cet 
livre a mes parents. Addresse Lehrer Harlak." 
"Meinen lieben Eltern gewidmet in Grune bei Lisser 
in Posen." 

He writes, "I noticed how our cavalry had plun- 
dered here." He gives an instance of how the men 
broke to pieces what they could not carry away. "La 
Guerre est la Guerre." He writes that in French. 
He runs his table of values. 

1 kleiner sous = 4 pfennig. 
1 grosser sous = 8 " 
y 2 sous =2 " 

He has a vocabulary of French words in his own 
handwriting. His record is one of honest distress at 
the pillage done by his comrades. 

When the French soldiers say "Cest la Guerre" — 
"that's the way it is with war" — they refer to the 
monotony of it, or the long duration, or some curious 
ironic contrast between a peaceful farmyard scene 
and a Taube dropping bombs. The Germans say it 
again and again in their diaries, sometimes in the 
French phrase, sometimes "Das ist der Krieg," and 
almost always they use it in speaking of a village 
they have burned or peasants they have shot. To 



178 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

them that phrase is an absolution for any abomina- 
tion. It is the blood-brother of "military necessity." 

Carl Zimmer, Lieutenant of the 57th Infantry of 
the VII Corps, has a diary that runs from August 2 
to October 17, 1914. On August 29 he tells of 
marching through a village of Belgium. 

"Very many houses burned whose inhabitants had 
shot at our soldiers. 250 Civilians shot. 55 

At the head of his diary he writes: "Mit Gott 
fur Konig und Vaterland." His record is in ink. 
Bielefeld in Westphalia is his home town. 

Prussia has Prussianized Germany. These diaries 
cover the Empire. The writers are Rhenish Pom- 
eranian and Brandenburgian, Saxon and Bavarian. 
And the very people, such as the Bavarians and 
Saxons, whom we had hoped were of a merciful tra- 
dition, have bettered the instruction of the military 
hierarchy at Berlin. What Prussia preached they 
have practiced with the zeal of a recent convert eager 
to please his master. 

Fahlenstein, a reservist of the 34 Fusiliers, II 
Army Corps, writes on August 28th: 

"They (the French troops) lay heaped up 8 to 
10 in a heap, wounded and dead, always one on top 
of the other. Those who could still walk were made 
prisoners and brought with us. The severely 
wounded, with a shot in the head or lungs and so 
forth, who could not make further effort, received 



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Photograph of the German Diary, examined by the 
writer of this book. It was written by Corporal Menge 
of the 8th. Company of the 74th. Reserve Infantry. 
He reports: "A cure and his sister hanged, houses 
burned." 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 179 

one more bullet, which ended their life. That is 
indeed what we were ordered to do." 

("Die schwer verwundeten . . . bekamen den- 
noch eine Kugel zu, dass ihr Leben ein Ende hatte. 
Das ist uns ja auch befohlen worden.") 

His unwillingness to do the wicked thing must be 
subordinated to the will of the officer. 

Corporal Menge of the Eighth Company of the 
74th Reserve Infantry, 10 Reserve Corps, writes in 
his diary for August 15: 

"Wir passieren unter dreimaligen Hurra auf 
unsern Kaiser u. unter den Klangen d. Liedes 
Deutschland iiber alles die Belgische Grenze. Alle 
Baume ungefallt als Sperre. Pfarrer u. dessen 
Schwester aufgehangt, Hauser abgebrannt." 

("We passed over the Belgian border under a 
three times given Hurrah for our Kaiser, and under 
the Strain of the song Deutschland iiber alles. All 
the trees were felled as barricades. A cure and his 
sister hanged, houses burned.") 

This is a neatly written diary, which he wishes 
to be sent to Fraulein F. Winkel of Hanover. 

Penitential days are coming for the German Em- 
pire and for the German people. For these acts of 
horror are the acts of the people : man by man, regi- 
ment by regiment, half a million average Germans, 
peasants and clerks, stamped down through Belgium 
and Northern France, using the incendiary pellet and 



180 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

the bayonet. In the words of the manifesto, signed 
by the 93 Wise Men of Germany, referring to the 
German army, "Sie kennt keine zuchtlose Grausam- 
keit" : it doesn't know such a thing as undisciplined 
cruelty. No, these are the acts of orderly procedure, 
planned in advance, carried out systematically. 
Never for an instant did the beautiful disciplined 
efficiency of the regiment relax in crushing a child 
and burning an inhabited house. The people of 
Germany have bowed their will to the implacable 
machine. They have lost their soul in its grinding. 

Private Sebastian Weishaupt of the Third Ba- 
varian Infantry, First Bavarian Corps: 

"10.8.1914 — Parie das erste Dorf verbrannt, 
dann gings los; Dorf nach dem andern in Flam- 
men ; iiber Feld und Acker mit Rad bis wir dann an 
Strassengraben kamen, wo wir dann Kirschen assen." 

("Octobre 8, 1914. Parux is the first village 
burned, then things break loose: 1 village after an- 
other to the flames; over field and meadow with 
cycle we then come to the roadside ditches, where 
we ate cherries.") 

It is all in the day's work : the burning of villages, 
the murder of peasants, the eating of cherries. Trav- 
elers among savage tribes have told of living among 
them for years, and then suddenly in a flash the 
inmost soul of the tribe has revealed itself in some 
sudden mystical debauch of blood. There is an im- 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 181 

mense unbridled cruelty in certain of these German 
soldiers expressing itself in strange, abnormal ways. 
This is the explanation of some of the outrages, 
some of the mutilations. But, for the most part, 
the cruelty is not perversion, nor a fierce, jealous 
hate. It is merely the blind, brutal expression of 
imperfectly developed natures, acting under orders. 

Gottsche, now commissioned officer of the 85 
Infantry Regiment, 9 Army Corps, writes : 

"The captain summoned us together and said : In 
the fort which is to be taken there are apparently 
Englishmen. I wish to see no Englishmen taken 
prisoner by the company.' A universal Bravo of 
agreement was the answer." 

(" Teh wiinsche aber Keinen gefangenen Eng- 
lander bei: der Kompagnie zu sehen.' Ein allge- 
meines Bravo der Zustimmung war die Antwort.") 

Forty-three years of preparedness on every detail 
of treachery and manslaughter, but not one hour of 
thought on what responses organized murder would 
call out from the conscience of the world, nor what 
resistances such cruelty would create. It is curious 
the way they set down their own infamy. There 
is all the naivete of a primitive people. Once a 
black man from an African colony came to where a 
friend of mine was sitting. He was happily chop- 
ping away with his knife at a human skull which 
he wore suspended from his neck. He was as inno- 



182 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

cent in the act as a child jabbing a pumpkin with 
his jack-knife. So it has been with the Germans. 
They burn, plunder, murder, with a light heart. 

There are noble souls among them who look on 
with sad and wondering eyes. What manner of 
men are these, they ask themselves in that intimacy 
of the diary, which is like the talk of a soul with its 
maker. These men, our fellow-countrymen, who 
behave obscenely, who pour out foulness — what a 
race is this of ours ! That is the burden of the self- 
communion, which high-minded Germans have writ- 
ten down, unconscious that their sadness would be 
the one light in the dark affair, unaware that only 
in such revolt as their own is there any hope at all 
of a future for their race. 

The most important diary of all is that of an offi- 
cer whose name I have before me as I write, but I 
shall imitate the chivalry of the French government 
and not publish that name. It would only subject 
his family to reprisal by the German military power. 
He belongs to the 46th Reserve Infantry Regiment, 
5 Reserve Corps. He has a knack at homely de- 
tails. He enters a deserted house where the pen- 
dulum of the clock still swings and ticks and sounds 
the hours. He believes himself under the direct pro- 
tection and guidance of God. He sees it when a 
shell explodes, killing his comrades. He speaks of 
the beauty of the dead French officers, as he sees 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 183 

them lying in a railway station. He is skeptical 
about the lies told against French and Belgians. He 
realizes that the officers are whipping up a fury 
in the men, so that they will obey orders to kill and 
burn. In his pages you can see the mighty machine 
at work, manufacturing the hate which will lead 
to murder. The hand on the lever at Berlin sets 
grinding the wheels, and each little cog vibrates and 
moves in unison. He is a simple, pious man, shocked 
by the wickedness of his soldiers, offended by the 
cruelty of the officers, hating war, longing for its 
end. He plans to publish his memoirs of the cam- 
paign, with photographs, which he will return to 
France to make after the war. He is a natural 
philosopher. Most of all, he loves his quiet smoke, 
which keeps him good-humored. He has written a 
page in his diary in praise of tobacco. 

"I smoke about ten cigars a day. And if it hadn't 
been for these cigars my good-humor in these dan- 
gers and fatigues would be much less. Smoking 
gives me to a degree calm and content. With it I 
have something to occupy my thoughts. It is neces- 
sary for one to see these things in order to under- 
stand." 

Later he writes : 

"October 15, 1914. It had been planned at first 
that we should go into quarters at Billy (Billy sous- 
Nangiennes), where the whole civil population had 



184 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

been already forced out, and whatever was movable 
had been taken away or made useless. This method 
of conducting war is directly barbarous. I am aston- 
ished how we can make any complaint over the be- 
havior of the Russians. We conduct ourselves in 
France much worse, and on every occasion and on 
every small pretext we have burned and plundered. 
But God is just and sees everything. His mills 
grind slowly, but exceedingly small." 

("Diese Art kriegfiihrung ist direkt barbarisch 
. . . bei jeder Gelegenheit wird unter irgend einem 
Vorwande gebrannt und gepliindert. Aber Gott ist 
gerecht und sieht alles: seine Muhlen mahlen lang- 
sam aber schrecklich klein.") 

These extracts which I have given are from diaries 
of which I have examined the originals, and gone 
word by word over the German, in the penciling of 
the writer. The revelation of these diaries is that 
the Germans have not yet built their moral founda- 
tions. They have shot up to some heights. But it 
is not a deep-centered structure they have reared. It 
is scaffolding and fresco. We shall send them back 
home to begin again. Sebastian Weishaupt and Pri- 
vate Hassemer and Corporal Menge must stay at 
home. They must not come to other countries to 
try to rule them, nor to any other peoples, to try to 
teach them. Their hand is somewhat bloody. That 
is my feeling in reading these diaries of German 



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came to the roadside ditches, where we ate cherries" — so 
writes Sebastian Weishaupt of the 3 Bavarian Infantry. 



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"We have burned and plundered. But God is just 
and sees everything. His mills grind slowly, but ex- 
ceeding small." — The diary of an officer of the 46 Re- 
serve Infantry Regiment. 



SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 185 

soldiers — poor lost children of the human race, back 
in the twilight of time, so far to climb before you 
will reach civilization. We must be very patient 
with you through the long years it will take to cast 
away the slime and winnow out the simple goodness, 
which is also there. 



Ill 



MORE DIARIES 



IN former European wars foul practices were 
committed by individual members of armies. 
But the total army in each country was a small 
hired band of men, representing only the fractional 
part of one per cent of the population. It was in 
no way representative of the mind of the people. 
Of the present German Army, Professor Dr. Max 
Planck, of the University of Berlin, a distinguished 
physicist, has recently written: 

"The German Army is nothing but the German 
people in arms, and the scholars and artists are, like 
all other classes, inseparably bound up with it." 

We must regard the acts of the German Army as 
the acts of the people. We cannot dodge the prob- 
lem of their misbehavior by saying they have not 
committed atrocities. We have the signed state- 
ments of a thousand German diaries that they have 
practiced frightfulness village by village through 
Belgium and Northern France. We cannot say it 
was a handful of drunken, undisciplined soldiers 

186 



MORE DIARIES 187 

who did these things. It was "the German people 
in arms." It was an army that "knows no such thing 
as undisciplined cruelty." It was a nation of people 
that burned and murdered, acting under orders. 
Now, we have arrived at the heart of the problem. 
Why did they commit these horrors *? 

Irritated by an unexpectedly firm resistance from 
the Belgian and French Armies, fed on lies spread 
by German officers concerning the cruelty of French 
and Belgians, they obeyed the commands to burn 
houses and shoot civilians. 

These commands released a primitive quality of 
brutality. 

On August 25th, 1914, Reservist Heinrich Bis- 
singer, of the town of Ingolstadt, of the Second Com- 
pany, of the First Bavarian Pioneers, writes of the 
village of Orchies: 

"A woman was shot because she did not stop at 
the word Halt, but kept running away. Thereupon 
we burn the whole place." 

("Samtliche Civilpersonen werden verhaftet. 
Eine Frau wurde vershossen, weil sie auf Halt Rufen 
nicht hielt, sondern ausreissen wollte. Hierauf Ver- 
brennen der ganzen Ortschaft.") 

One wonders if Heinrich Bissinger would wish 
the treatment he and his comrades accorded to 
Orchies, to be applied to his own home town of In- 
golstadt. If some German peasant woman in In- 



188 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

golstadt failed to understand a word in a foreign 
tongue, and were killed, and then if Ingolstadt were 
burned, would Heinrich Bissinger feel that "military 
necessity" exonerated the soldiers that performed 
the deed? 

Private Philipp, from Kamenz, Saxony, of the 
First Company, of the first Battalion of the 178th 
Regiment, writes: "Kriegs Tagebuch-Soldat Philipp, 
1 Kompanie (Sachsen)," at the head of his diary. 
On August 23 he writes of a village that had been 
burned : 

"A spectacle terrible and yet beautiful. Directly 
at the entrance lay about 50 dead inhabitants who 
had been shot, because they had traitorously fired on 
our troops. In the course of the night many more 
were shot, so that we could count over 200. Women 
and children, lamp in hand, had to watch the hor- 
rible spectacle. Then in the middle of the corpses 
we ate our rice; since morning we had eaten noth- 
ing. By search through the houses we found much 
wine and liquor, but nothing to eat." 

("Im Laufe der Nacht wurden noch viele erschos- 
sen, sodass wir iiber 200 zahlen konnten. Frauen 
und Kinder, die Lampe in der Hand, mussten dem 
entsetzlichen Schauspiele zusehen. Wir assen dann 
inmitten der Leichen unsern Reis, seit Morgen hat- 
ten wir nichts gegessen.") 

German soldiers obey these orders because their 



MORE DIARIES 189 

military training and their general education have 
made them docile. They have never learned to ex- 
ercise independent individual moral judgment on 
acts ordered by the state. The state to them is an 
organism functioning in regions that lie outside the 
intellectual and moral life of the individual. In 
every German there are separate water-tight com- 
partments: the one for the life he leads as a hus- 
band and father, the other for the acts he must com- 
mit as a citizen of the Empire and as a soldier of 
the Army. In his home life he makes choices. In 
his public life he has no choice. He must obey with- 
out compunctions. So he lays aside his conscience. 
In the moral realm the German is a child, which 
means that he is by turns cruel, sentimental, forget- 
ful of the evil he has done the moment before, 
happy in the present moment, eating enormously, 
pleased with little things, crying over a letter from 
home, weary of the war, with sore feet and a rebel- 
lious stomach, a heavy pack, and no cigars. I am 
basing every statement I make on the statements 
written by German soldiers. We do not have to 
guess at German psychology. They have ripped 
open their subconsciousness. 

The lieutenant of the 5th Battalion of reserves of 
the Prussian Guard writes on August 24 at Cirey : 

"In the night unbelievable things have taken 



i9o OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

place. Warehouses plundered, money stolen, viola- 
tions simply hair-raising." 

("In der Nacht sind unglaubliche Sachen passiert. 
Laden ausgepliindert, Geld gestohlen, Vergewaltig- 
ungen, Einfach haarstraubend." ) 

This diary of the lieutenant's has a black cover, a 
little pocket for papers, a holder for the pencil. It 
is written partly in black pencil and partly in pur- 
ple. Thirty-two pages are written, 118 are blank. 
It covers a space of time from August 1 to Septem- 
ber 4, 1914. 

Mrs. Wharton has brought to my attention the 
chronicle of Salimbene, a Franciscan of the thir- 
teenth century, wherein similar light-hearted crimes 
are recorded. 

"On one day he (Ezzelino) caused 11,000 men 
of Padua to be burnt in the field of Saint George; 
and when fire had been set to the house in which 
they were being burnt, he jousted as if in sport 
around them with his knights. 

"The villagers dwelt apart, nor were there any 
that resisted their enemies or opened the mouth or 
made the least noise. And that night they (the 
soldiers) burned 53 houses in the village." 

The orders given by the German commanding 
general to his officers, far from recommending pru- 
dence and humanity, impose the obligation of hold- 
ing the total civil population collectively respon- 



MORE DIARIES 191 

sible for the smallest individual infractions, and of 
acting against every tentative infringement with 
pitiless severity. These officers are as specialized a 
class as New York gunmen or Paris apaches. Their 
career lies in anti-social conduct. "This wild upper- 
class of the young German imperialistic idea" are 
implacable destroyers. Their promotion is depend- 
ent on the extent of their cruelties. 

I have seen an original copy of the order for the 
day (Korps-Tagesbefehl) issued on August 12, 
1914, by General von Fabeck, commanding the 13th 
Army Corps. He says: 

"Lieutenant Haag of the 19th Regiment of 
Uhlans, acting as chief of patrol, has proceeded en- 
ergetically against the rioting inhabitants, and as 
agreed has employed arms. I express to him my 
recognition for his energy and his decision." 

("Ich spreche ihm fur seinen Schneid und seine 
Umsicht meine Anerkennung aus.") 

What that gives to Lieutenant Haag is the power 
of life and death over non-combatants, with praise 
for him if he deals out death. 

Let us hear General von Fabeck speak again. 
Here are his instructions for his troops on August 
15, 1914 (I have held the original in my hands) : 

"As soon as the territory is entered, the inhabitants 
are to be held responsible for maintaining the lines 
of communication. For that purpose the commander 



192 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

of the advance guard will arrange a strong patrol of 
campaign gendarmes (Feldgendarmerie-Patrouille) 
to be used for the interior of the locality held by 
our troops. Against every inhabitant who tries to 
do us a damage, or who does us a damage, it is nec- 
essary to act with pitiless severity." 

"Mit riicksichtsloser Strenge." 

This order is on long sheets of the nature of our 
foolscap. It is written in violet ink. 

The copy reads: 

gez. v. Fabeck 

Fur die Richtigkeit der Abschrift 

Baessler 

Oberlt. und Brig- Adjutant. 

Baessler is the aide-de-camp. 

Two violations of the rights of non-combatants 
are in that order. The requisitioning of inhabitants 
on military work where they are exposed to the fire 
of their own nation; pitiless severity applied to 
every non-combatant on the least suspicion of a 
hostile act. 

Actually the state which the simple soldiers obey 
so utterly is an inner clique of landed proprietors, 
captains of industry, and officers of the army — men 
of ruthless purpose and vast ambitions. The sixty- 



MORE DIARIES 193 

five millions of docile peasants, clerks, artizans and 
petty officials are tools for this inner clique. 

"The theories of the German philosophers and 
public men are of one piece with the collective acts 
of the German soldiers. The pages of the Pan- 
German writers are prophetic. They are not so much 
the precursors as the results, the echoes of a some- 
thing impersonal that is vaster than their own voice. 
Here we have acted out the cult of force, creator 
of Right, practiced since its dim origins by Prussia, 
defended philosophically by Lasson, scientifically by 
Haeckel and Ostwald, politically by Treitschke, and 
in a military way by General von Bernhardi." 

The modern Germany is the victim of an obsession. 
Under its sentimental domestic life, its placid beer- 
garden recreation, its methodical activities, its rev- 
eries, its emotional laxity fed on music, it was gen- 
erating destructive forces. Year by year it was 
thinking the thoughts, inculcated by its famous 
teachers, until those ideas, pushed deep down into 
the subconscious, became an overmastering desire, a 
dream of world-grandeur. For once an idea pene- 
trates through to the subconsciousness, it becomes 
touched with emotional life, later to leap back into 
the light of day in uncontrolled action. 

I can produce one of the original bills posted on 
the walls of Liege by General von Bulow. Here is 
the way it reads : 



194 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Ordre. 
A la population Liegeoise. 

La population d'Andenne, apres avoir temoigne 
des intentions pacifiques a l'egard de nos troupes, 
les a attaquees de la fagon la plus traitresse. Avec 
mon autorisation, le General qui commandait ces 
troupes a mis la ville en cendres et a fait fusilier 1 10 
personnes. Je porte ce fait a la connaissance de la 
ville de Liege, pour que ses habitants sachent a quel 
sort ils peuvent s'attendre s'ils prennent une attitude 
semblable. 

Liege, le 22 Aout, 1914. 

General von Bulow. 

("The inhabitants of the town of Andenne, after 
having testified to their peaceful intentions in regard 
to our troops, attacked them in a fashion the most 
treacherous. By my authorization, the General who 
commanded the troops has burned the town to ashes 
and has shot 110 people. I bring this to the knowl- 
edge of the town of Liege, in order that the inhab- 
itants may know what fate they invite if they take a 
like attitude.") 

It is only in victorious conquest that the German 
is unendurable. When he was trounced at the Battle 
of the Marne, he ceased his wholesale burnings and 
massacres throughout that district, and continued his 
campaign of frightfulness only in those sections of 



MORE DIARIES 195 

Belgium around Antwerp where he was still conquer- 
ing new territory. His dream of world conquest 
will die in a day, when the day comes that sends 
him home. In defeat, he is simple, kindly, sur- 
prised at humane treatment. He ceases to be a 
superman at the touch of failure. All his blown-up 
grandeur collapses, and he shrinks to his true 
stature. 

This return to wholesomeness is dependent on two 
things: a thorough defeat in this war, so that the 
German people will see that a machine fails when 
it seeks to crush the human spirit, and an internal 
revolution in the conception of individual duty to 
the state, so that they will regain the virtues of 
common humanity. The water-tight compartments, 
which they have built up between the inner voice 
of conscience in the individual life and the outer 
compulsion of the state, must be broken through. 



IV 



THE BOOMERANG 

ONE of the best jokes of the war has been 
put over on the Germans by themselves. 
Here I quote from a German diary of which 
I have seen the original. It is written by a sub- 
officer of the Landwehr, of the 46th Reserve Regi- 
ment, the 9th Company, recruited from the province 
of Posen. He and his men are on the march, and 
the date is August 2 1 . He writes : 

"We are informed of things to make us shudder 
concerning the wickedness of the French, as, for 
instance, that our wounded, lying on the ground, 
have their eyes put out, their ears and noses cut. 
We are told that we ought to behave without any 
limits. I have the impression that all this is told us 
for the sole purpose that no one shall stay behind or 
take the French side; our men also are of the same 
opinion." 

On August 23 he writes : 

"I learn from different quarters that the French 
maltreat our prisoners; a woman has put out the 
eyes of an Uhlan." 

196 



THE BOOMERANG 197 

By August 24 all this begins to have its effect on 
the imperfectly developed natures of his comrades, 
and he writes: 

"I find among our troops a great excitability 
against the French." 

There we can see the machinery of hate in full 
operation. The officers state the lies to the soldiers. 
They travel fast by rumor. The primitive, emo- 
tional men respond with ever-increasing excitement 
till they readily carry out murder. 

Let us see how all this is working back home in 
the Fatherland. I have seen the photographic re- 
production of a letter written by a German woman 
to her husband (from whose body it was taken), in 
which she tells him not to spare the French dogs 
("Hunden"), neither the soldiers nor the women. 
She goes on to give her reason. The French, she 
says, men and women, are cruel to German prisoners. 
The story had reached her. 

The German Chancellor in September, 1914, 
stated in an interview for the United States: 

"Your fellow countrymen are told that German 
troops have burned Belgian villages and towns, but 
you are not told that young Belgian girls have put 
out the eyes of the defenseless wounded on the field 
of battle. Belgian women have cut the throats of 
our soldiers as they slept, men to whom they had 
given hospitality." 



198 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

The final consecration of the rumor was given by 
the Kaiser himself. On September 8, 1914, he sent 
a cable to President Wilson, in which he repeated 
these allegations against the Belgian people and 
clergy. Of course, he knew better, just as his Chan- 
cellor and General Staff and his officers knew better. 
It was all part of the play to charge the enemy with 
things akin to what the Germans themselves were 
doing. That makes it an open question, with "much 
to be said on both sides." That creates neutrality 
on the part of non-investigating nations, like the 
United States. 

But what he and his military clique failed to see 
was that they had discharged a boomerang. The 
comeback was swift. The German Protestants be- 
gan to "agitate" against the German Roman Cath- 
olics. The old religious hates revived; a new relig- 
ious war was on. Now, this was the last thing 
desired by the military power. An internal strife 
would weaken war-making power abroad. Here was 
Germany filled with lies told by the military clique. 
Those lies were creating internal dissension. So the 
same military clique had to go to work and deny the 
very lies they had manufactured. They did not deny 
them out of any large love for the Belgian and 
French people. They denied them because of the 
anti-Catholic feeling inside Germany which the lies 
had stirred up. German official inquiries have estab- 



THE BOOMERANG 199 

lished the falsity of the atrocity charges leveled 
against the Belgians. • 

A German priest, R. P. Bernhard Duhr, S. J., 
published a pamphlet-book, "Der Liigengeist im 
Volkekrieg. Kriegsmarchen gesammelt von Bern- 
hard Duhr, S. J.," (Miinchen-Regensburg, Ver- 
lagsanstat, Vorm. G. J. Manz, Buch und Kunst- 
druckei, 1915). Its title means "The spirit of false- 
hood in a people's war. Legends that spring up in 
wartime." His book was written as a defense of 
Roman Catholic interests and for the sake of the 
internal peace of his own country. This book I have 
seen. It is a small pamphlet of 72 pages, with a red 
cover. The widest circulation through the German 
Empire was given to this proof of the falsity of the 
charges laid to the Allies. Powerful newspapers pub- 
lished the denials and ceased to publish the slanders. 
Generals issued orders that persons propagating the 
calumnies, whether orally, by picture or in writing, 
would be followed up without pity. So died the 
legend of atrocities by Belgians. The mighty power 
of the Roman Catholic Church had stretched out its 
arm and touched the Kaiser and his war lords to 
silence. 

The charges are treachery, incitement to murder 
and battle, traitorous attacks, the hiding of machine 
guns in church towers, the murder, poisoning and 
mutilation of the wounded. The story ran that the 



200 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

civil population, incited by the clergy, entered ac- 
tively into hostilities, attacking troops, signaling to 
the Allies the positions occupied by the Germans. 
The favorite and most popular allegation was that 
women, old people and children committed atrocities 
on wounded Germans, putting out their eyes, cut- 
ting off their fingers, ears and noses ; and that priests 
urged them on to do these things and played an 
active part in perpetrating the crimes. Putting out 
the eyes became the prize story of all the collection. 

The German priest, Duhr, runs down each lie to 
its source, and then prints the official denial. Thus, 
a soldier of the Landwehr sends the story to Ober- 
hausen (in the Rhine provinces) : 

"At Libramont the Catholic priest and the burgo- 
master, after a sermon, have distributed bullets to 
the civil population, with which the inhabitants fire 
on German soldiers. A boy of thirteen years has 
put out the eyes of a wounded officer, and women, 
forty to fifty years old, have mutilated our wounded 
soldiers. The women, the priest and the burgo- 
master have been all together executed at Treves. 
The boy has been condemned to a long term in the 
home of correction." 

The German commander of the garrison at Treves 
writes : 

"Five Belgian francs-tireurs who had been con- 
demned to death by the court martial were shot at 



THE BOOMERANG 201 

Treves. A sixth Belgian, still rather young, has been 
condemned to imprisonment for many years. Among 
the condemned there were neither women, nor priests 
nor burgomaster." 

This communication is signed by Colonel Wey- 
rach. 

Postcards representing Belgian francs-tireurs 
were placed on sale at Cassel. The commander of 
the district writes : 

"The commanding general of the XI Army Corps 
at Cassel has confiscated the cards." 

Wagner Bauer, of the Prussian Ministry of War, 
writes of another tale: 

"The story of the priest and the boy spreads as a 
rumor among troops on the march." 

The Herner Zeitung, an official organ, in its issue 
of September 9, printed the following: "Among the 
French prisoners was a Belgian priest who had col- 
lected his parishioners in the church to fire from 
hiding on the German soldiers. Shame that German 
soil should be defiled by such trash! And to think 
that a nation which shields rascals of that sort dares 
to invoke the law of humanity !" 

Frhr. von Bissing, commanding general of the VII 
Army Corps, writes: 

"The story of a Belgian priest, reported by the 
Herner Zeitung does not answer at any point to the 
truth, as it has since been established. The facts 



202 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

have been communicated to the Herner Zeitung con- 
cerning their article." 

The Hessische Zeitung prints the following under 
title of "Letters from the Front by a Hessian In- 
structor" : 

"The door of the church opens suddenly and the 
priest rushes out at the head of a gang of rascals 
armed with revolvers." 

The Prussian Ministry of War replies: 

"The inquiry does not furnish proof in support of 
the alleged acts." 

The Berliner Tageblatt, for September 10, has a 
lively story : 

"It was the cure who had organized the resistance 
of the people, who had them enter the church, and 
who had planned the conspiracy against our troops." 

The Prussian Minister of War makes answer: 
"The cure did not organize the resistance of inhab- 
itants; he did not have them enter the church, and 
he had not planned the conspiracy against our 
troops." 

The dashing German war correspondent, Paul 
Schweder, writes in Landesbote an article, "Under 
the Shrapnel in Front of Verdun." He says that 
he saw : 

"A convoy of francs-tireurs, at their head a priest 
with his hands bound." 

The German investigator pauses to wonder why 



THE BOOMERANG 203 

every prisoner and every suspect is a franc-tireur, 
and then he goes on with his inquiry, which results 
in a statement from the Prussian War Minister : 

"Deiber (the priest) had nothing charged against 
him, was set at liberty, and, at his own request, has 
been authorized to live at Oberhaslach." 

The Frankfurter Zeitung, September 8, has a 
spirited account of a combat with francs-tireurs in 
Andenne, written by Dr. Alex Berg, of Frankfort : 

"The cure went through the village with a bell, 
to give the signal for the fight. The battle began 
immediately after, very hotly." 

The military authority of Andenne, Lieutenant 
Colonel v. Eulwege: 

"My own investigation, very carefully made, 
shows no proof that the cure excited the people to a 
street fight. Every one at Andenne gives a different 
account from that, to the effect that most of the 
people have seen hardly anything of the battle, so- 
called, because they had hidden themselves from 
fear in the cellars." 

Finally, the War Ministry and the press wearied 
of individual denials, and one great blanket denial 
was issued. Der Volkerkrieg, which is a compre- 
hensive chronicle of review of the war, states: 

"It is impossible to present any solid proof of 
the allegation, made by so many letters from the 
front, to the effect that the Belgian priests took part 



204 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

in the war of francs-tireurs. Letters of that kind 
which we have heretofore reproduced in our record 
— for example, the recital of events at Louvain and 
Andenne — are left out of the new editions." 

Der Fels, Organ der Central-Auskunftstelle der 
katholischen Presse, states: 

"The serious accusations which I have listed are 
not only inaccurate in parts and grossly exaggerated, 
but they are invented in every detail, and are at 
every point false." 

And, again, it says: 

"All the instances, known up to the present and 
capable of being cleared up, dealing with the alleged 
cruelties of Catholic priests in the war, have been 
found without exception false or fabrications 
through and through." 

Turning to the "mutilations," we have the Nach 
Feierabend publishing a "letter from the front" 
which tells of a house of German wounded being 
burned by the French inhabitants. Asked for the 
name of the place and the specific facts, the editor 
replied that "you are not the forum where it is my 
duty to justify myself. Your proceeding in the 
midst of war of representing the German soldiers 
who fight and die as liars, in order to save your own 
skin, I rebuke in the most emphatic way." 

But the Minister of War got further with the 
picturesque editor, and writes : 



THE BOOMERANG 205 

"The editorial department of the Nach Feierabend 
states that it hasn't any longer in its possession the 
letter in question." 

Now we come to the most famous of all the 
stories. 

"At a military hospital at Aix-la-Chapelle an en- 
tire ward was filled with wounded, who had had 
their eyes put out in Belgium." 

Dr. Kaufmann, an ecclesiastic of Aix-la-Chapelle, 
writes : 

"I send you the testimony of the head doctor of a 
military hospital here, a celebrated oculist whom I 
consulted just because he is an oculist. He writes 
me: 

" 'In no hospital of Aix-la-Chapelle is there any 
ward of wounded with their eyes put out. To my 
knowledge absolutely nothing of the sort has been 
verified at Aix-la-Chapelle.' " 

The Kolnische Volkzeitung, October 28, gives the 
testimony of Dr. Vulles, of the hospital in Stephan- 
strasse, Aix-la-Chapelle, in reference to the "Ward 
of Dead Men," where "twenty-eight soldiers lay 
with eyes put out." The men laughed heartily 
when they were asked if they had had their eyes 
put out. 

"If you wish to publish what you have seen," said 
Dr. Vullers, "you will be able to say that my col- 



206 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

league, Dr. Thier, as well as myself, have never 
treated a single soldier who had his eyes put out." 

Professor Kuhnt, of the clinic for diseases of the 
eye at Bonn, writes : 

"I have seen many who have lost their sight be- 
cause of rifle bullets or shell fire. The story is a 
fable." 

The Weser-Zeitung has a moving story of a hos- 
pital at Potsdam for soldiers wounded by the f rancs- 
tireurs, where lie officers with their eyes put out. 
"Young Belgian girls, of from fourteen to fifteen 
years of age, at the incitement of Catholic priests, 
have committed the crimes." 

The commander at Potsdam writes : 

"There is no special hospital here for soldiers 
wounded by the francs-tireurs. There are no officers 
here with eyes put out. The commander has taken 
measures to correct the article under dispute, and 
also in other publications." 

So perish the lies used against Belgium. Lies 
manufactured by the General Staff and taught to 
their officers, to be used among the soldiers, in order 
to whip them to hate, because in that hate they 
would carry out the cold cruelty of those officers 
and of that General Staff. Lies put out in order to 
blind the eyes of neutrals, like the government at 
Washington, to the pillage, the burning and the mur- 
der which the German army was perpetrating as it 



THE BOOMERANG 207 

marched through Belgium and Lorraine. Lies that 
later had to be officially denied by the same military 
power that had manufactured them, because those 
lies were stirring up civil strife at home, and be- 
cause the Roman Catholic Germans investigated the 
sources and silenced the liars. 

The Kaiser cabled to our country: 

"The cruelties committed in this guerilla war- 
fare by women, children and priests on wounded 
soldiers, members of the medical staff and ambu- 
lance workers have been such that my generals have 
at last been obliged to resort to the most rigorous 
measures. My heart bleeds to see that such measures 
have been made necessary and to think of the count- 
less innocents who have lost their life and property 
because of the barbarous conduct of those criminals." 

Now that he knows that those stories are lies he 
must feel sorrier yet that his army killed those count- 
less innocents and burned those peasant homes. 



SECTION IV 
THE PEASANTS 



THE LOST VILLAGES 

I WAS standing in what was once the pleasant 
village of Sommeilles. It has been burned 
house by house, and only the crumbled rock was 
left in piles along the roadside. I looked at the 
church tower. On a September morning, at fourteen 
minutes of nine o'clock, an incendiary shell had cut 
through the steeple of the church, disemboweled the 
great clock, and set the roof blazing. There, fac- 
ing the cross-roads, the hands of the clock once so 
busy with their time-keeping, are frozen. For 
twenty-three months, they have registered the instant 
of their own stoppage. On the minute hand, which 
holds a line parallel with that of the earth, a linnet 
has built its nest of straw. The hour-hand, out- 
paced by its companion at the moment of arrest, 
was marking time at a slant too perilous for the 
home of little birds. Together, the hands had trav- 
eled steadily through the hours which make the years 
for almost a century. High over the village street, 
they had sent the plowman to his field, and the girl 

211 



212 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

to her milking. Children, late from their play, had 
scrambled home to supper, frightened by that lofty 
record of their guilt. And how many lovers, stray- 
ing back from the deep, protecting meadows, have 
quickened their step, when the revealing moon 
lighted that face. Now it marks only cessation. It 
tells of the time when a village ceased to live. Some- 
thing came down out of the distance, and destroyed 
the activities of generations — something that made 
an end of play and love. Only the life of the linnet 
goes on as if the world was still untroubled. North- 
ern France is held in that cessation. Suddenly death 
came, and touched seven hundred villages. Nor can 
there ever be a renewal of the old charm. The art 
of the builders is gone, and the old sense of security 
in a quiet, continuing world. 

I have been spending the recent days with these 
peasants in the ruins of their shattered world. Lit- 
tle wooden baraquements are springing up, as neat 
and bare as the bungalows of summer visitors on 
the shore of a Maine lake. Brisk brick houses and 
stores lift out of crumpled rock with the rawness of a 
mining camp. It is all very brave and spirited. 
But it reminded me of the new wooden legs, with 
shining leather supports, and bright metal joints, 
which maimed soldiers are wearing. Everything is 
there which a mechanism can give, but the life-giv- 
ing currents no longer flow. A spiritual mutilation 



THE LOST VILLAGES 213 

has been wrought on these peasant people in de- 
stroying the familiar setting of their life. They had 
reached out filaments of habit and love to the deep- 
set hearth and ancient rafters. The curve of the 
village street was familiar to their eye, and the pro- 
file of the staunch time-resisting houses. 

From a new wooden structure, with one fair-sized, 
very neat room in it, a girl came out to talk with 
us. She was about twenty years old, with a settled 
sadness in her face. Her old home had stood on 
what was now a vegetable garden. A fragment of 
wall was still jutting up out of the potatoes. Every- 
thing that was dear to her had been carefully burned 
by the Germans. 

"All the same, it is my own home," she said, 
pointing to the new shack, "it does very well. But 
my mother could not stand it that everything was 
gone. We ran away for the few days that the 
Germans were here. My mother died eight days 
after we came back." 

The 51st Regiment of German Infantry entered 
the village, and burned it by squirting petrol on 
piles of straw in the houses. The machine they used 
was like a bicycle pump — a huge syringe. Of the 
Town Hall simply the front is standing, carrying its 
date of 1836. Seventeen steps go up its exterior, 
leading to nothing but a pit of rubbish. 



214 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

"For three days I lay hidden without bread to 
eat," said a passer-by. 

An old peasant talked with us. He told us that 
the Germans had come down in the night, and 
burned the village between four and six in the morn- 
ing. A little later, they fired on the church. With 
petrol on hay they had burned his own home. 

"Tout brule," he kept repeating, as he sent his 
gaze around the wrecked village. He gestured with 
his stout wooden stick, swinging it around in a circle 
to show the completeness of the destruction. Five 
small boys had joined our group. The old man 
swung his cane high enough to clear the heads of the 
youngsters. One of them ran off to switch a wan- 
dering cow into the home path. 

"Doucement," said the old man. ("Gently.") 

We went to his home, his new home, a brick house, 
built by the English Quakers, who have helped in 
much of this reconstruction work. He and his wife 
live looking out on the ruin of their old home. 

"Here was my bed," he said, "and here the chim- 
ney plate." 

He showed the location and the size of each fa- 
miliar thing by gestures and measurements of his 
hands. Nine of the neighbors had lain out in the 
field, while the Germans burned the village. He 
took me down into the cave, where he had later hid- 
den ; the stout vaulted cellar under the ruined house. 



THE LOST VILLAGES 215 

"It is fine and dry," I suggested. 

"Not dry," he answered, pointing to the roof. I 
felt it. It was wet and cold. 

"I slept here," he said, "away from the entrance 
where I could be seen." 

His wife was made easier by talking with us. 

"How many milliards will bring us back our hap- 
piness?" she asked. "War is hard on civilians. My 
husband is seventy-eight years old." 

The cupboard in her new home stood gaping, 
because it had no doors. 

"I have asked the carpenter in Revigny to come 
and make those doors," she explained, "but he is 
always too busy with coffins ; twenty-five and thirty 
coffins a day." 

These are for the dead of Verdun. 

When the Germans left Sommeilles, French offi- 
cers found in one of the cellars seven bodies: those 
of Monsieur and Madame Alcide Adnot, a woman, 
thirty-five years old, and her four children, eleven 
years, five, four, and a year and a half old. The 
man had been shot, the young mother with the right 
forearm cut off, and the body violated, the little girl 
violated, one of the children with his head cut off. 
All were lying in a pool of blood, with the splatter 
reaching a distance of ninety centimeters. The Ger- 
mans had burned the house, thinking that the fire 



216 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

would destroy the evidence of their severity, but the 
flames had not penetrated to the cellar. 

Sommeilles is in one of the loveliest sections of 
Europe, where the fields lie fertile under a tem- 
perate sun, and the little rivers glide under green 
willow trees. Villages of peasants have clustered 
here through centuries. One or two of the hundreds 
of builders that lifted Rheims and Chartres would 
wander from the larger work to the village church 
and give their skill to the portal, adding a choice- 
ness of stone carving and some bit of grotesquerie. 
Scattered through the valleys of the Marne, and 
Meuse, and Moselle, you come on these snatches of 
the great accent, all the lovelier for their quiet setting 
and unfulfilled renown. 

The peasant knew he was part of a natural proc- 
ess, a slow, long-continuing growth, whose begin- 
nings were not yesterday, and whose purpose would 
not end with his little life. And the aspect of the 
visible world which reinforced this inner sense was 
the look of his Town Hall and his church, his own 
home and the homes of his neighbors — the work of 
no hasty builders. In the stout stone house, with 
its gray slabs of solidity, he and his father had lived, 
and his grandfather, and on back through the gen- 
erations. There his son would grow up, and one day 
inherit the house and its goods, the gay garden and 
the unfailing fields. 



THE LOST VILLAGES 217 

Things are dear to them, for time has touched 
them with affectionate association. The baker's wife 
at Florent in the Argonne is a strapping ruddy 
woman of thirty years of age, instinct with fun and 
pluck, and contemptuous of German bombs. But 
the entrance to her cellar is protected by sand-bags 
and enormous logs. 

"You are often shelled?" asked my friend. 

"A little, nearly every day," she answered. "But 
it's all right in the cellar. For instance, I have re- 
moved my lovely furniture down there. It is safe in 
the shelter." 

"Oh, then, you care more for your furniture than 
you do for your own safety?" 

"Why," she answered, "you can't get another set 
of furniture so easily as all that." And she spoke 
of a clock and other wedding-presents as precious to 
her. 

A family group in Vassincourt welcomed us in the 
room they had built out of tile and beams in what 
was once the shed. The man was blue-eyed and fair 
of hair, the woman with a burning brown eye, the 
daughter with loosely hanging hair and a touch of 
wildness. The family had gone to the hill at the 
south and watched their village and their home 
burn. They had returned to find the pigs ripped 
open. The destruction of live stock was something 
more to them than lost property, than dead meat. 



218 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

There is an intimate sense of kinship between a 
peasant and his live stock — the horse that carries him 
to market, his cows and pigs, the ducks that bathe 
in the pool of his barnyard and the hens that bathe 
in the roadside dust. No other property is so per- 
sonal. They had lost their two sons in the war. 
The woman in speaking of the French soldiers called 
them "Ces Messieurs," "these gentlemen." 

In this village is a bran-new wooden shed, "Cafe 
des Amis," with the motto, "A la Renaissance," "To 
the Rebirth." 

In Sermaize, nearly five hundred men marched 
away to fight. When the Germans fell on the town, 
2,200 were living there. Of these 1,700 have re- 
turned. There are 150 wooden sheds for them, and 
a score of new brick dwellings, and twenty-four 
brick houses are now being built. Six hundred are 
living in the big hotel, once used in connection with 
the mineral springs for which the place was famous : 
its full name is Sermaize-les-Bains. Eight hundred 
of the 840 houses were shelled and burned — one- 
third by bombardment, two-thirds by a house to 
house burning. 

The Hotel des Voyageurs is a clean new wooden 
shed, with a small dining-room. This is built on 
the ruins of the old hotel. The woman proprietor 
said to me : 

"We had a grand hotel, with twelve great bed- 



THE LOST VILLAGES 219 

rooms and two dining-rooms. It was a fine large 
place." 

The Cafe des Allies is a small wooden shed, look- 
ing like the store-room of a logging camp. We 
talked with the proprietor and his wife. They used 
to be manufacturers of springs, but their business 
was burned, their son is dead in the war, and they 
are too old to get together money and resume the 
old work. So they are running a counter of soft 
drinks, beer and post cards. The burning of their 
store has ended their life for them. 

We talked with the acting Mayor of Sermaize, 
Paul Frangois Grosbois-Constant. He is a merchant, 
fifty-four years old. The Germans burned his six 
houses, which represented his lifetime of savings. 

"The Germans used pastilles in burning our 
houses," he said, "little round lozenges, the size of a 
twenty-five-centime piece (this is the same size as an 
American quarter of a dollar). These hop about 
and spurt out fire. They took fifty of our inhab- 
itants and put them under arrest, some for one day, 
others for three days. Five or six of our people 
were made to dress in soldiers' coats and casques, 
and were then forced to mount guard at the bridges. 
The pillage was widespread. The wife and the 
daughter of Auguste Brocard were so frightened by 
the Germans that they jumped into the river, the 
river Saulx. Brocard tried to save them, but was 



220 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

held back by the Germans. Later, when he took out 
the dead bodies from the river, he found a bullet 
hole in the head of each." 

As we drove away from Sermaize, I saw in the 
village square that a fountain was feebly playing, 
lifting a thin jet of water a few inches above the 
basin. 



II 

THE HOMELESS 

WE are a nomadic race, thriving on change. 
Apartment houses are our tents : many of 
us preempt a new flat every moving day. 
This is in part an inheritance from our pioneer readi- 
ness to strike camp and go further. It is the adap- 
tability of a restless seeking. It is also the gift made 
by limitless supplies of immigrants, who, having torn 
up their roots from places where their family line 
had lived for a thousand years, pass from street to 
street, and from city to city, of the new country, 
with no heavy investment of affection in the local 
habitation. Once the silver cord of ancestral mem- 
ory is loosened, there is little in the new life to bind 
it together. The wanderer flows on with the flowing 
life about him. To many of us it would be an 
effort of memory to tell where we were living ten 
years ago. The outline of the building is already 
dim. 

The peasant of France has found a truth of life in 
planting himself solidly in one place, with an abid- 

221 



222 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

ing love for his own people, for the house and the 
village where he was born. Four centuries ago the 
French poet wrote: 

Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage 
Ou comme cestuy-la qui conquit la Toison 
Et puis est retourne plein a" usage et raison 
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son age. 

Quand revoiray-je helasl de mon petit village 
Fumer la cheminee, et en quelle saison 
Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison 
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage. 

Plus me plaist le sejour qu'ont basty mes ayeux 
Que des palais romains le front audacieux 
Plus que le marbre dur me plaist Vardoise fine. 

Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre latin 

Plus mon petit Lire que le mont Palatin 

Et plus que Vair marin la douceur Angevine. 

Happy the man who like Ulysses has traveled far and wide, 

Or like that other who won the Golden Fleece, 

And then wended home full worn and full wise, 

To spend among his own folk the remainder of his days. 

When shall I see once more alack! above my little hamlet 
Rise the chimney smoke, and in what season of the year 
Shall I see once more the garden of my humble home, 
Which is a wide province in my eyes, and even more. 



THE HOMELESS 223 

Dearer to my heart is the home my forefathers built 
Than the cloud-capped tops of haughty Roman palaces. 
Dearer than hardest marble the fine slate of my roof. 

Dearer my Gaulish Loire than Tiber's Latin stream. 
Dearer my little hill of Lire than Mount Palatinus, 
And than sea-airs the sweet air of Anjou. 

Till yesterday that voice still spoke for the un- 
changing life of France. The peasant remained 
where his forefathers had broken the fields and 
loaded the wains. Why should he be seeking strange 
lands, like the troubled races'? He found his place 
of peace long ago. To what country can he travel 
where the sun is pleasanter on happy fields 4 ? What 
people can he visit who have the dignity and sim- 
plicity of his neighbors'? 

Then the hordes from the north came down, eager 
to win this sunny quietness, curious to surprise the 
secret of this Latin race, with its sense of form and 
style, its charm, its sweet reasonableness. Why are 
these Southerners loved 4 ? Why do their accomplish- 
ments conquer the world so gently, so irresistibly 6 ? 
Surely this hidden beauty will yield to violence. So 
it came, that dark flood from the north, pouring 
over the fertile provinces, breaking the peace of these 
peasants. Something was destroyed where the 
human spirit had made its home for a longer time 
than the individual life: a channel for the genera- 



224 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

tions. Their fields are still red with the poppy, but 
their young men who reaped are busy on redder 
fields. Their village street is crumbled stone, 
through which the thistle thrusts. The altar of their 
church is sour with rain water, and the goodness of 
life is a legend that was slain in a moment of time. 
A modern city can be rebuilt. An ancient village can 
never be rebuilt. That soft rhythm of its days was 
caught from old buildings and a slowly ripening 
tradition. Something distinguished has passed out 
of life. What perished at Rheims in the matchless 
unreturning light of its windows was only a larger 
loss. A quiet radiance was on these villages, too. 

Still the peasants return to the place they know. 
Even their dead are more living than the faces of 
strangers in cities. The rocks in the gutter once 
held their home. There is sadness in a place where 
people have lived and been happy, and now count 
their dead. It is desolate in a way wild nature never 
is, for the raw wilderness groups itself into beauty 
and order. It would have been better to let the 
forest thicken through centuries, than to inherit the 
home where one day the roof-tree is razed by the 
invader. These peasants are not hysterical. They 
are only broken-hearted. They tell their story in a 
quiet key, in simple words, with a kind of grayness 
of recital. There are certain experiences so appalling 
to the consciousness that it can never reveal the 



THE HOMELESS 225 

elements of its distress, because what was done killed 
what could tell. But the light of the day is never 
seen again with the same eyes after the moment 
that witnessed a child tortured, or one's dearest shot 
down like a clay pigeon. The girl, who was made 
for happiness, when she is wife and mother, will 
pass on a consciousness of pain which had never 
been in her line before. The thing that happened 
in a moment will echo in the troubled voices of her 
children, and a familiar music is broken. 



Ill 



MON GAMIN 



ONE day when I was in Lorraine, a woman 
came to me carrying in her hands a boy's 
cap, and a piece of rope. She was a peasant 
woman about forty years of age, named Madame 
Plaid. She said: 

"You see, Monsieur, I found him in the fields. 
He was not in the house when the Germans came 
here. I thought that my little scamp (mon gamin) 
was in danger, so I looked everywhere for him. He 
was fourteen years old, only that, at least he would 
have been in September, but he seemed to be all of 
nineteen with his height and his size. 

"I asked the Prussians if they had not seen my 
little scamp. They were leading me off and I feared 
that they would take me away with them. The 
Prussians said that somebody had fired on them 
from my house. 

"Your son had a rifle with him and he fired on 
us, just like the others," they said. 

"I answered: 'My little scamp did not do any- 
thing, I am sure.' 

226 



"MON GAMIN" 227 

" 'What shirt did he have on?' they asked. 

" £ A little white shirt with red stripes,' I replied. 

"They insisted that he was the one that had fired. 

"When the cannonading stopped, the people who 
had been with me told me that they had seen a young 
man lying stretched out in the field, but they could 
not tell who it was. I wanted to see who it was 
that was lying there dead, and yet I drew back. 

" 'No,' I said to myself, 'I am too much afraid.' 

"But I crossed the field. I saw his cap which 
had fallen in front of him. I came closer. It was 
he. He had his hands tied behind his back. 

"See. Here is the cord with which he had been 
killed. For he had not been shot. He had been 
hanged. 

(She held out to us the cord — a coil of small but 
strong rope.) 

"And here is the cap. 

(She was holding the gray cap in her two hands.) 

"When I saw him, I said to the Prussians: 

" 'Do the same thing to me now. Without my 
little scamp I cannot go on. So do the same to me.' 

"Three weeks later, I went again to search for my 
little scamp. I did not find him any more. The 
French soldiers had buried him with their dead." 



IV 



THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 

WE were searching for the Mayor of Cler- 
mont, not the official Mayor, but the real 
Mayor. This war has been a selector of 
persons. When the Germans came down on the 
villages, timid officials sometimes ran and left their 
people to be murdered. Then some quiet cure, or 
village store-keeper, or nun, took over the leader- 
ship. Wherever one of these strong souls has lived 
in the region of death, in that village he has saved 
life. When the weak and aged were wild with 
terror, and hunted to their death, he has spoken 
bravely and acted resolutely. The sudden rise to 
power of obscure persons throughout Northern 
France reminds an American of the life history of 
Ulysses Grant. So at Clermont, the Mayor took to 
his heels, but Edouard Jacquemet, then sixty-eight 
years old, and his wife, stayed through the bonfire 
of their village and their home. And ever since, they 
have stayed and administered affairs. 

Clermont was a village of one thousand inhab- 
228 




The Mayor of Clermont and his wife, who did not run 
away when the invaders came. 



THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 229 

itants. Thirty-eight persons remained — old people, 
religious sisters and the Jacquemets. The Germans 
burned 195 houses. The credit falls equally to a 
corps of Uhlans with the Prince of Wittgenstein at 
their head, and to the XIII corps from Wurttem- 
berg, commanded by General von Urach. The par- 
ticular regiments were the 121st and i22d Infantry. 

We inquired of soldiers where we could find the 
Mayor. 

"He is up above," they said. We were glad to 
leave the hot little village, with its swarms of flies, 
its white dust that lay on top of the roadbed in 
thick, puffy heaps, and its huddles of ruined houses. 
Each whirring camion, minute by minute, grinding 
its heavy wheels into the crumbling road, lifted 
white mists of dust, which slowly drifted upon the 
leaves of trees, the grass of the meadows, and the 
faces of soldiers. Eyebrows were dusted, hair went 
white, mustaches grew fanciful. Nature and man 
had lost all variety, all individuality. They were 
powdered as if for a Colonial ball. The human 
eye and the eyes of cattle and horses were the only 
things that burned with their native color through 
that veil of white that lay on Clermont. 

We went up a steep, shaded hill, where the clay 
still held the summer rains. The wheels of our car 
buzzed on the slush — "All out," and we did the last 
few hundred yards on foot. We were bringing the 



230 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Mayor good news. The Rosette of the Legion of 
Honor had just been granted him. 

We found him in a little vine-covered old stone 
house on the hilltop, where he took refuge after his 
village was burned. He wept when my friend told 
him that the emblem of the highest honor in France 
was on its way. 

"It means I have done something for my country," 
he said. 

He is a cripple with one leg short. He goes on 
crutches, but he goes actively. He has fulfilled his 
life. His sons are fighting for France, and he, too, 
has served, and his service has been found acceptable 
in her sight. He is bright and cheery, very patient 
and sweet, with that gentleness which only goes 
with high courage. But underneath that kindliness 
and utter acceptance of fate, I felt that "deep lake 
of sadness," which comes to one whose experience has 
been over- full. 

So we came through the dust of the plain and 
the clay of the climb to a good green place. It is a 
tiny community set on a hill. That hill was cov- 
ered with stately trees — a lane of them ran down 
the center of the plateau, as richly green and fragrant 
as the choicest pine grove of New England. The 
head of the lane lost itself in a smother of low-lying 
bushes and grasses, lush-green and wild. But just 
before it broke into lawlessness, one stout tree, stand- 



THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 231 

ing alone, shot up ; and tacked to its stalwart trunk, 
this notice fronts the armies of France: 



"Cantonnement de Clermont. 

"Il est formellement interdit aux visiteurs 
ou autres d'attacher des chevaux aux arbres. 
toute degradation aux arbres sera severement 
reprimee. 

"Ordre du Commandant de Cantonnement. 

"It is absolutely forbidden to visitors or 
anybody else to tie their horses to the trees. 
any damage to the trees will be severely 
punished. 

"By order of the Commander." 

Little strips of bark from the protected tree 
framed the notice. 

There was the voice of France, mindful of the 
eternal compulsions of beauty, even under the guns. 
No military necessity must destroy a grove. In the 
wreckage of almost every precious value in that 
Argonne village, the one perfect thing remaining 
must be cherished. 

Nowhere else have I ever seen that combination 
of wildness and stateliness, caught together in one 
little area, except on some hill crest of New Hamp- 
shire. For the first time in two years I felt utterly 
at home. This was the thing I knew from child- 



232 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

hood. Nothing that happened here could seem 
strange. Nothing spoken in that grove of firs would 
fall in an alien tongue. The lane was doubly 
flanked by great growths, planted in 1848 — the inner 
line of cypresses, the outer windshield of fir trees. 
One lordly fir had been blown down by a shell, and 
cut up for kindling. Other shell-holes pitted the 
grove. We were standing on an historic spot. In 
the XIV century, Yolande of Flanders built her 
castle here, high above danger. She was the Coun- 
tess of Bar-le-Duc, the Catherine de Medici of her 
district. When a little village to the North pro- 
tested at her heavy taxes, she burned the village. 
The Bishop sent two vicars to expostulate. She 
drowned the two vicars, then built three churches in 
expiation, one more for good measure than the num- 
ber of vicars, and died in the odor of sanctity. One 
of her chapels is on the plateau where we were 
standing. On the outer wall is a sun dial in colors, 
with a Latin inscription around the rim. 

"As many darts as there are hours. Fear only 
one dart, the last one." 

So the old illuminator had written on this Chapel 
of Saint Anne. 

"Only one shell will get you — your own shell. 
No need to worry till that comes, and then you 
won't worry," how often the soldiers of France have 



THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 233 

said that to me, as they go forward in their blithe 
fatalism. 

Little did the hand that groined that chapel aisle 
and fashioned that inscription in soft blue and gold 
know in what sad sincerity his words would fall 
true. When he lettered in his message for the hid- 
den years, he never thought it would speak cen- 
turies away to the intimate experience of fighting 
men on the very spot, and that his hilltop would 
be gashed with shell-pits where the great 220's had 
come searching, till the one fated shell should find 
its mark. 

The Mayor led me down the grove, his crutches 
sinking into the conifer bed of the lane. From the 
rim of the plateau, we looked out on one of the 
great panoramas of France. The famous roads from 
Varenne and Verdun come into Clermont and pass 
out to Chalons and Paris. Clermont is the channel 
through the heart of France. From here the way 
lies straight through Verdun to Metz and Mayence. 
We could see rolling fields, and mounting hills, 
ridge on ridge, for distances of from twelve to 
twenty-five miles. To the South-East, the East, and 
the North and the West, the sweep of land lay under 
us and in front of us : an immense brown and green 
bountiful farm country. There we were, lifted over 
the dust and strife. In a practice field, grenades 
clattered beneath us. From over the horizon line, 



234 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

the guns that nest from Verdun to the Somme grum- 
bled like summer thunder. 

"I have four sons in the war," said the Mayor. 
"One is a doctor. He is now a prisoner with the 
Germans. The other three are Hussar, Infantry and 
Artillery." 

We turned back toward the house. His wife was 
walking a little ahead of us, talking vivaciously with 
a couple of officers. 

"My wife," he went on, "has the blood of four 
races in her, English, Greek, Spanish and French. 
She is a very energetic woman, and brave. She is a 
soul. She is a somebody. {Elle est une ame. Elle 
est quelqifun?)" 

We talked with her. She is brown-eyed and of 
an olive skin, with gayety and ever-changing ex- 
pression in the face. But she is near the breaking- 
point with the grief of her loss, and the constant 
effort to choke down the hurt. Her laughter goes 
a little wild. I felt that tears lay close to the lightest 
thing she said. Her maiden name was Marie- 
Amelie-Anne Barker. 

"When the Germans began to bombard our vil- 
lage," she told me, "my husband and I went down 
into the cellar. He stayed there a few minutes. 

" 'Too damp,' he said. He climbed upstairs and 
sat in the drawing-room through the rest of the 



THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 235 

bombardment. Every little while I went up to see 
him, and then came back into the cellar. 

"After their bombardment they came in person. 
In the twilight of early morning they marched in, 
a very splendid sight, with their great coats thrown 
over the shoulder. I heard them smash the doors 
of my neighbors. The people had fled in fright. 
The soldiers piled the household stuff out in the 
street. I saw them load a camion with furniture 
taken from the home of M. Desforges and with 
material taken from Nordmann, our merchant of 
novelties. 

"A doctor, with the rank of Major, seized the 
surgical dressings of our hospital, although it was 
under the Red Cross flag. 

"I stood in my door, watching the men go by. 

"You are not afraid?" asked one. 

"I am not afraid of you," I replied. 

"I believed my house would not be burned. It 
was the house where the German Emperor William 
the First spent four days in 1870. It was the house 
where he and Bismarck and Von Moltke mapped 
out the plan of Sedan. You see it was the finest 
house in this part of France. Each year since 1871, 
three or four German officers have come to visit it, 
taking photographs of it, because of the part it 
played in their history. I was sure it would not be 
burned by them. 



236 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

"I left all my things in it — the silverware, the 
little trinkets and souvenirs, handed down in my 
family, and gathered through my lifetime. I said 
to myself, if I take them out, they will treat it as a 
deserted house. I will show them we are living 
there, with everything in sight. I was working 
through the day at the hospital, caring for the Ger- 
man wounded. 

"The soldiers began their burning with the house 
of a watchmaker. They burned my house. I saw it 
destroyed bit by bit (morceau par morceau). I saw 
my husband's study go, and then the drawing-room, 
and the dining-room. The ivories, the pictures, the 
bibelots, everything that was dear to me, everything 
that time had brought me, was burned. 

"I said to the German doctor that it was very 
hard. 

"He replied : If I had known it was Madame's 
house, I should have ordered it to be spared.' " 

We were silent for a moment. Then Madame 
Jacquemet said: 

"Come and see what we have now." 

She led us upstairs to a room which the two beds 
nearly filled. 

"All that I own I keep under the beds," she ex- 
plained. "See, there are two chairs, two beds. 
Nothing more. And we had such a beautiful room." 



THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 237 

"Why did you burn our homes?" I asked a Ger- 
man officer, after the village was in ruins. 

"We didn't burn the place," he answered. "It 
was French shells that destroyed it." 

"I was here," I answered. "There were no 
French shells." 

"The village people fired on our troops," he said. 

"I was here," I told him. "The village people 
did not fire on your troops. The village people ran 
away." 

"An empty town is a town to be pillaged," he 
explained. 

The Mayor took up the story. 

"A German officer took me into his room, one 
day," he said. "He closed the door, and began: 

"I am French at heart. I believe that your vil- 
lage was burned as a spectacle for the Crown Prince 
who has his headquarters over yonder at a village a 
few kilometers away." 

The picture he summoned was so vivid that I 
said, "Nero — Nero, for whom the destruction of a 
city and its people was a spectacle. Only this is a 
little Nero. Out of date and comic, not grandiose 
and convincing." 

Monsieur Jacquemet went on: 

"They burned our houses with pastilles, the little 
round ones with a hole in the middle that jump as 
they burn. In the Maison Maucolin we found three 



238 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

liters of them. The Thirty-first French Regiment 
picked them up when they came through, so that 
no further damage should come of them. The Ger- 
mans left a sackful in the park belonging to M. Des- 
forges. The sack contained 500 little bags, and 
each bag had 100 pastilles. Monsieur Grasset threw 
the sack into water, as a measure of safety." 

The Mayor had saved a few pastilles as evidence, 
and passed one of them around. He has an exact 
turn of mind. He made out a map of his hilltop, 
marking with spots and dates the shells that seek 
his home. 

Under one of the oldest of the linden trees — the 
historian of our party, Lieutenant Madelin, won- 
dered how old: "four, five centuries, perhaps" — we 
ate an open-air luncheon. Our hosts were the Mayor 
and his wife. Our fellow-guests were the Captain 
and the Major — the Major a compact, ruddy, sailor 
type of man, with the far-seeing look in his blue eyes 
of one whose gaze comes to focus at the horizon 
line. 

It seemed to me like the simple farm-meals I had 
so often eaten on the New England hills, in just 
that rapid sunlight playing through the leaves of 
great trees, in just that remote clean lift above the 
dust and hurt of things. I thought to myself, I 
shall always see the beauty of this little hill rising 
clear of the ruin of its village. 



THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 239 

Then we said good-by, and I saw on the doorstep, 
sitting motionless and dumb, the mother of a soldier. 
Her white hair was almost vivid against the decent 
somber black of her hood, and dress. There was a 
great patience in her figure, as she sat resting her 
chin on her hand and looking off into the trees, as 
if time was nothing any more. For many days the 
carpenters had not been able to work fast enough 
to make coffins for the dead of Clermont. She was 
waiting on the Mayor's doorstep for the coffin of 
her son. 



THE LITTLE CORPORAL 

WE were in the barracks of the Eighth Regi- 
ment of Artillery. They have been con- 
verted into a home for refugees, but the 
old insignia of famous victories still adorn the walls. 
We were talking with Madame Derlon. She is a 
refugee from Pont-a-Mousson, widowed by German 
severity. But unlike so many women of Lorraine 
whom I met, she still could look to her line continu- 
ing. For while she sat, slightly bent over and tired, 
Charles, her fifteen-year-old son ("fifteen and a half, 
Monsieur"), stood tall and straight at her side. 
While the mother told me her story, I looked up 
from her and saw on the wall the escutcheon of the 
Regiment, and I read in illuminated letters the 
names of the battles in which it had fought: 

"Austerlitz — 1805. 
Friedland — 1807. 
Sebastopol — 1854. 
Solferino — 1859." 
240 



THE LITTLE CORPORAL 241 

At the beginning of the war, her husband was 
ferryman of the Moselle, she said. He carried 
civilians and soldiers across. Their little son, then 
thirteen years old, liked to be near him, and watch 
the river and the passing of people. The boy had 
discovered a cellar under the bridge — a fine under- 
ground room, well-vaulted, where boy-like he had 
hidden tobacco and where he often stayed for hours, 
dreaming of the bold things he would do when his 
time came, and he would be permitted to enlist. 
His day was closer than he guessed. A cave is as 
wonderful to a French boy as it was to Tom Sawyer. 
Sometimes he made a full adventure of it and slept 
the night through there. 

During the early battles, the bridge had been 
blown up. So Father Derlon was kept very busy 
ferrying peasants and stray soldiers from bank to 
bank. One day three German patrols came along. 
Charles was standing by the bridge, watching his 
father sitting in the wherry. The boy stepped down 
into his underground room to get some tobacco. He 
was gone only five minutes. When he came back, 
the three Germans said to him : 

"Your father is dead." 

It was so. They had climbed the bridge, and 
fired three times; one explosive bullet had entered 
the ferryman's head, and two had shattered his arm. 



242 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

The Germans said he had been carrying soldiers 
across, and that it was wrong to carry soldiers. 

"The little one came home crying," said Madame 
Derlon. "Since that moment, the little one left 
home without telling me. He did not send me any 
news of himself. I searched everywhere to try to 
find a trace of him. Monsieur Louis Marin, the 
Deputy, told me he had seen a boy like my little one 
following the soldiers. Actually he had been 
adopted by the 95th Territorial Regiment." 

He told the soldiers that he had just seen his 
father killed by the Germans. One of the captains 
took him under his protection. The boy insisted on 
becoming a fighter. He was brave and they made 
him Corporal. He fell wounded in action, winning 
the Croix de Guerre. 

Charles Derlon, the little Corporal of the 95th 
Infantry, has a bright open face, but it is a face 
into which has passed the look of responsibility. In 
one moment, he became a man, and he has that quiet 
dignity of a boy whom older men respect and make 
a comrade of. He holds himself with the trim 
shoulders and straight carriage of a little soldier of 
France. 

One of us asked him : 

"And weren't you afraid, my boy, of the fight?" 

"It is all the same to me," he replied, "when I get 
used to it." 




The Little French Corporal, who joined the army at 14 
years of age and, wounded, won the Cross of War. 




The Cure of Triaucourt (at the right) who stayed with 
his people when the village was burned. Next him, in 
trench helmet, stands one of the thousands of French priests 
who serve by day and night at the front, rescuing the 
wounded, and cheering the fighting men. 



THE LITTLE CORPORAL 243 

"And why," we pressed him, "did you run away 
without going to your mother? Didn't you think 
she might be anxious?" 

"Because I knew very well," he said, "that she 
would not want to let me go." 

"And you are away from the army now, 'on per- 
mission' ?" we asked. 

Very proudly he answered : 

"No, Monsieur. I am on leave of convalescence 
for three months. I have been wounded in three 
places, two wounds in my arm, and one in my leg." 



VI 



THE GOOD CURE 



WHAT was true of Joan of Arc is true 
to-day. There is no leadership like the 
power of a holy spirit. It lends an edge 
to the tongue in dealing with unworthy enemies. It 
gives dignity to sudden death. Religion, where it 
is sincere, is still a mighty power in the lives of 
simple folk to lift them to greatness. Out beyond 
Rheims, at the front line trenches, the tiny village 
of Betheny is knocked to pieces. The parish church 
is entirely destroyed except for the front wall. 
Against that wall, an altar has been built, where the 
men of the front line gather for service. Over the 
altar I read the words 

Que le Cceur de Jesus sauve la France. 
In that name many in France are working. Such 
a one is Paul Viller, cure of Triaucourt. The burn- 
ing of the village is the world's end for a peasant, 
because the village was his world. When the peas- 
ants of Triaucourt saw their little local world rock- 
ing, they turned to the cure. He was ready. 

244 



THE GOOD CURE 245 

"It is better to run," said the Mayor; "they kill, 
those Germans." 

As the cure said to the German lieutenant who 
tried to force him up the bell-tower, "That ascen- 
sion will give me the vertigo," so he felt about run- 
ning away : his legs were not built for it. He would 
like to "oblige," but he was not fashioned for such 
flights. 

Cure Viller is 55 years old, short and ruddy and 
sturdy. In his books and his travel, and well- 
grounded Latin education, he is far removed from 
the simple villagers he serves. But he has learned 
much from them. He has taken on their little ways. 
He has their simplicity which is more distinguished 
than the manners of cities. With them and with him 
I felt at home. That is because he was at home with 
himself, at home in life. His house was full of 
travel pictures — Brittany fishermen and nooks of 
scenery. He had the magazine litter, scattered 
through all the rooms, of a reading man who cannot 
bear to destroy one printed thing that has served a 
happy hour. His volumes ranged through theology 
up to the history of Thiers. His desk was the desk 
of an executive, orderly, pigeon-holed, over which 
the transactions of a village flow each day. A young 
priest entered and stated a case of need. The cure 
opened a little drawer, peeled off five franc notes 
from a bundle, and saw the young man to the door. 



246 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

It was as clean-cut as the fingering of a bank-cashier. 
The only difference was the fine courtesy exchanged 
by the men. 

The cure talked with us about the Germans. We 
asked him how the peasants felt toward them, after 
the burning and the murders. 

"I will tell you how the village electrician felt," 
replied he. "He came back after the troops had left 
and took a look about the village. 

" Tf I ever get hold of those Germans, I'll chew 
them up,' he said to me. 

" 'Some of them are still here,' I replied. 

" 'Show them to me quick,' he demanded. 

" 'They are in the church — grievously wounded.' 

"We went there. A German was lying too high 
on his stretcher, groaning from his wound and the 
uncomfortable position. 

" 'Here, you, what are you groaning about?' 
thundered the electrician. He lit a cigarette and 
puffed at it, as he glared at his enemy. 

" 'Uncomfortable, are you? I'll fix you,' he went 
on, sternly. Very gently he eased the German down 
into the softer part of the stretcher, and tucked in 
his blankets. 

" 'Now, stop your groaning,' he commanded. He 
stood there a moment in silence, then burst out again 
angrily : 



THE GOOD CURE 247 

" What are you eyeing me for*? Want a ciga- 
rette, do you?' 

"He pulled out a cigarette, put it in the lips of 
the wounded man and lit it. Then he came home 
with me and installed electric lights for me. That 
was the way he chewed up the Germans. 

"As for me, I lost twenty pounds of weight be- 
cause of those fellows. After they have been in a 
room, it is a chaos : men's clothing, women's under- 
garments, petticoats, skirts, shoes, napkins, cloths, 
hats, papers, boxes, trunks, curtains, carpets, furni- 
ture overturned and broken, communicants' robes — 
everything in a mess. I have seen them take bottles 
of gherkins, cherries, conserves of vegetables, pots 
of grease, lard, hams, everything they could eat or 
drink. What they couldn't carry, they destroyed. 
They opened the taps of wine casks, barrels of oil 
and vinegar, and set flowing the juice of fruits ready 
for distillation. 

"The official pillage of precious objects which are 
to be sent to Germany is directed by an officer. He 
has a motor car and men. I have sometimes asked 
for vouchers for the objects, stolen in that way. The 
vouchers are marked with the signature of the officer 
doing the requisitioning, and with the stamp of the 
regiment. But who will do the paying, and when 
will they do it"? The plunderer who takes bottles 



248 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

of wine gives vouchers. I have seen some of them 
which were playfully written in German, reading : 

" 'Thanks, good people, we will drink to your 
health.' 

"They don't always have good luck with their 
pillage. A Boche, who is an amateur of honey, rum- 
mages a hive. The valiant little bees hurl them- 
selves on the thief and give him such a face that he 
can't open his mouth or his eyes for a couple of 
days. A Roche once held out to me a handful of 
papers which he took for checks of great value. 
They were receipts filched from the drawers of 
Madame Albert Fautellier. The biter was well 
bitten. 

"When the Germans entered my house they held 
revolvers in their hand. It is so always and every- 
where. If all they are asking of you is a match, or 
a word of advice, the Boche takes out his revolver 
from its holster, and plunges it back in, when he has 
got what he wishes. With a revolver bullet he 
shoots a steer, and knocks down a pig with the butt 
of his rifle. The animals are skinned. He doesn't 
take anything but the choice morsels. He leaves the 
rest in the middle of the street, or a court or garden, 
the head, the carcass and the hide." 

No man in France had a busier time during the 
German occupation than this village cure. He went 
on with his recital : 



THE GOOD CURE 249 

"On Sunday morning, the Germans set our church 
clock by German time, but the bell was recalcitrant 
and continued to sound the French hour, while the 
hands galloped on according to their whim. While 
they were here, the hour didn't matter. We lost 
all notion of time. We hardly knew what day it 
was. My cellar is deep and well vaulted. I placed 
there a pick-ax, spades and a large shovel. Every 
precaution was taken. I placed chairs, and brought 
down water. Wax tapers, jammed in the necks of 
empty bottles, gave us light enough. That Sunday 
and the days following I had the pleasure of offer- 
ing hospitality to 76 persons. My parishioners knew 
that my home was wide open to them. When you 
are in numbers, you have less fear. 

"The men went into the garden to listen and see 
whether the battle was coming closer. I recited the 
rosary in a loud tone. The little children knelt on 
their knees on the pavement and prayed. Cavalry 
and infantry passed my door in silence. Once only, 
I heard the Teutons chanting; it was the third day of 
the battle: a regiment, muddy and frightened, re- 
entered Friaucourt chanting. 

"The hours go slowly. Suddenly we saw to the 
East a high column of smoke. Can that be the 
village of Evres on fire? I think it is, but to reassure 
my people I tell them that it is a flax-mill burning, 
or the smoke of cannon. At night we sleep on 



250 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

chairs. The children lie down on an immense carpet, 
which I fold over them, and in that portfolio they 
are able to sleep. 

"Monday was a day of glorious sunshine. Nature 
seemed to be en fete. After I had buried seven 
French and German dead, and was walking home, I 
saw coming toward me Madame Proces, her daugh- 
ter Helene, in tears, a German officer and a soldier. 
The officer asked me: 

" 'Do you know these ladies^' 

" 'Very well,' I answered, 'they are honest people 
of my parish.' 

" 'All right. This soldier has not shown proper 
respect to the young lady. He will be rebuked. If 
he had gone further he would be shot.' 

"The officer then reprimanded the soldier in my 
presence. The man, stiff at attention, listened to the 
rebuke in such a resentful, hateful way that I 
thought to myself there is going to be trouble. The 
soldier, his rifle over his shoulder, went toward the 
Mayor's office. 

"About twenty minutes later I heard firing from 
the direction of the Mayor's office, two shots, several 
shots, then a regular fusilade. The sullen soldier 
had gone down there, clapped his hand to his head, 
said he was wounded, and fired. When I heard the 
first firing, I thought it was only one more of their 



THE GOOD CURE 251 

performances. I had seen them kill a cow and a pig 
in the street by shooting them. 

"But at the sound of these shots the Germans ran 
out from the houses and the streets, rifle and re- 
volver in hand, shouting to me : 

" 'Your people have fired on us.' 

"I protested with all my power, saying that all 
our arms had been put in the Mayor's office, and 
that no one of us had done the firing. But they only 
shouted the louder: 

" 'Your people have fired on us.' 

"Flames broke out in the homes of Mr. Edouard 
Gand, and Mr. Gabriel Geminel. We saw the 
Boches set them on fire with incendiary fuses. Later 
on, we found the remnants of those fuses. 

"Women began running to me, weeping and 
saying : 

" 'Cure, save my father.' 'My child is in the 
flames.' 'They are killing my children.' 

"The shooting went on. The fire spread and 
made a hot cauldron of two streets. Cattle and 
crops and houses burned. 

"Then a strange thing happened. Some Germans 
aided in saving clothing and furniture from two or 
three of the houses. But most of them watched the 
destruction, standing silent and showing neither 
pleasure nor regret. I could tell it was no new 



252 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

sight for them. In two hours, there was nothing left 
of the thirty-five houses on two streets. 

"Our people ran out, chased by angry Germans 
who fired on them as if they were hunter's game. 
Jules Gand, 58 years old, was shot down at the 
threshold of his door. A seventeen-year-old boy 
named Georges Lecourtier, taking refuge with me, 
was shot. Alfred Lallemand hid himself in a 
kitchen. His body was riddled with bullets. We 
found it burned and lying in the rubbish, eight days 
later. He was 54 years old. Men, women and chil- 
dren fled into the gardens and the fields. They 
forded the river without using the bridge which was 
right there. They ran as far as Brizeaux and 
Senard. My cook ran. She had a packet of my 
bonds, which I had given her for safe-keeping, and 
she had a basket of her own valuables. In her fear 
she threw away her basket, and kept my bonds. 

"The daughter of one of our women, shot in this 
panic, came to me and said : 

" 'My mother had fifty thousand francs, some- 
where about her.' 

"The body had been buried in haste, with none 
of the usual rites paid the dead, of washing and 
undressing. So no examination had been made. We 
dug the body up and found a bag. 

" Ts that the bag 4 ?' I asked the daughter. 

" It looks like it,' she replied. It was empty. 



THE GOOD CURE 253 

"A day later we found another bag in the dead 
woman's room, and in it were the bonds for fifty 
thousand francs. That shows the haste and panic 
in which our people had fled, picking up the wrong 
thing, leaving the thing of most value. 

"It was in the garden of the Proces family that 
the worst was done. It was Helene Proces, you 
remember, who was insulted by the German soldier.* 
The grandmother, 78 years old, Miss Laure Menne- 
hand, the aunt, who was 81 years old, the mother, 
40 years old, and Helene, who was 18, ran down 
the garden. They placed a little ladder against the 
low wire fence which separated their back yard from 
their neighbor's. Helene was the first one over, and 
turned to help the older women. The Germans had 
followed them, and riddled the three women with 
bullets. They fell one on the other. Helene hid 
herself in the cabbages. 

"That same evening some of the villagers went 
with me to the garden. The women looked as if 
they were sleeping. They had no trace of suffer- 
ing in the face. Miss Mennehand had her little 
toilet bag, containing 1,000 francs, fastened to her 
left wrist, and was still holding her umbrella in her 
right hand. Her brains had fallen out. I collected 
them on a salad leaf and buried them in the garden. 

"We carried the three bodies to their beds in 
their home. In one bed, as I opened it, I saw a gold 



254 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

watch lying. From Monday evening till Wednesday 
morning, the bodies lay there, with no wax taper 
burning, and no one to watch and pray. By night 
the Germans played the piano, close by. 

" 'Your people fired on our soldiers, 5 said a Cap' 
tain to me next day. Til show you the window.' 

"He led me down the street, and pointed. 

" 'It is unfortunate you have chosen that window,'* 
I replied to him; 'at the time you started burning 
our village the only person in the house was a para- 
lytic man, who was burned in his bed.* 

"It was the house of Jean Lecourtier, 70 years old. 

"In front of the Poincare house, I met a General, 
who, they said, was the Duke of Wurttemberg. He 
said to me : 

" T am glad to see you, Cure. I congratulate you. 
You are the first chaplain I have seen. Generally, 
when we get to a village, the mayor and the cure 
have run away. We officers are angry at what has 
taken place here. You have treated us well.' 

" 'Perhaps you will be able to stop the horror,' 
I said to him. 

" 'Ah, what can you expect"? It is war. There 
are bad soldiers in your army and in ours.' 

"The next day I saw him getting ready to enter a 
magnificent car. His arm was bandaged. 

" 'You are wounded, General 4 ?' I asked him. 

" 'No, not that,' he answered. 



THE GOOD CURE 255 

" 'A strained ligament (entorse) ?' I asked. 

" 'No,' he said, 'don't tell me the French word/ 
He opened a pocket dictionary with his unhurt hand, 
wetting his finger and turning the pages. 

" 'It is a sprain (luxation),' he said. 

"That is the way they learn a language as they 
go along. 

" 'You are leaving us?' I asked. 

"Yes, I am going to my own country to rest.' 

The afternoon had passed while we were talking. 
We rose to make our good-bys. 

"Come with me," said the cure. He led us down 
the village street, to a small house, whose backyard 
is a little garden on the little river. All the setting 
was small and homelike and simple, like the village 
itself and the cure. A young woman stepped out 
from the kitchen to greet us. 

"This is the girl," said Father Viller. Helene 
Proces is twenty years old, with the dark coloring, 
soft, slightly olive skin, brown eyes, of a thousand 
other young women in the valley of the Meuse. But 
the look in her eyes was the same look that a friend 
of mine carries, though it is now twelve years since 
the hour when her mother was burned to death on 
board the General Slocum. Sudden horror has fixed 
itself on the face of this girl of Triacourt, whose 
mother and grandmother and aunt were shot in front 
of her in one moment. 



256 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

She led us through the garden. There were only 
a few yards of it: just a little homely place. She 
brought us to the fence — a low wire affair, cheaply 
made, and easy to get over. 

"The bullets were splashing around me," she said. 

The tiny river, which had hardly outgrown its 
beginnings as a brook, went sliding past. It seemed 
a quiet place for a tragedy. 



VII 



THE THREE-YEAR-OLD WITNESS 

TWO persons came in the room at Luneville 
where I was sitting. One was Madame 
Dujon, and the other was her granddaugh- 
ter. Madame Dujon had a strong umbrella, with a 
crook handle. Her tiny granddaughter had a tiny 
umbrella which came as high as her chin. As the 
grandmother talked, the sadness of the remembrance 
filled her eyes with tears. Her voice had pain in it, 
and sometimes the pain, in spite" of her control, came 
through in sobbing. The little girl's face was 
burned, and the wounds had healed with scars of 
ridged flesh on the little nose and cheek. The emo- 
tion of the grandmother passed over into the child. 
With a child's sensitiveness she caught each turn of 
the suffering. Troubled by the voice overhead, she 
looked up and saw the grandmother's eyes filled with 
tears. Her eyes filled. When her grandmother, tell- 
ing of the dying boy, sobbed, the tiny girl sobbed. 
The story of the murder tired the grandmother, and 
she leaned on her umbrella. The little girl put her 
chin on her tiny umbrella, and rested it there. 

257 



258 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Madame Dujon said: 

"I will try to tell you the beginning of what I 
have passed through, Monsieur, but I do not promise 
that I shall arrive at the end. It is too hard. The 
day of the twenty-fifth of August, which was a 
Monday " 

As she spoke her words were cut by sobs. She 
went on: 

"When the Germans came to our house, my son 
had to go all over the house to find things that they 
wanted. I did not understand them, and they were 
becoming menacing. I said to them : 

" 'I am not able to do any better. Fix things 
yourself. I give you everything here. I am going 
to a neighbor's house.' " 

She went with the tiny grand-girl, who was three 
years old, her son, Lucien, fourteen years old, and 
another son, sixteen. The Germans came here too, 
breaking in the windows, and firing their rifles. The 
house was by this time on fire. The face of the little 
girl was burned. 

"My poor boys wished to make their escape, but 
the fourteen-year-old was more slow than the other, 
because the little fellow was a bit paralyzed, and he 
already had his hands and body burned. He tried to 
come out as far as the pantry. I saw the poor little 
thing stretched on the ground, dying. 



THE THREE-YEAR-OLD WITNESS 259 

" 'My God,' he said, 'leave me. I am done for. 
Mamma, see my bowels.' 

"I saw his bowels. They were hanging like two 
pears from the sides of his stomach. Just then the 
Germans came, shooting. I said to them: 

" 'He has had enough.' 

"The little one turned over and tried to get the 
strength to cry out to them: 

" 'Gang of dirty " ("Bande de sal ") 

"Every one called to us to come out of the fire. 
The fire was spreading all over the house. I did 
not want to understand what they were saying. I 
went upstairs again where the little girl was, to 
try to save her (see still the marks which she re- 
ceived). I succeeded, not without hurt, in carrying 
away the little girl out of the flames. 

"I had to leave my boy in the flames, and, like a 
mad person, save myself with the little girl. 

"I have two sons-in-law, of whom one is the father 
of this little girl here. Look at her face marked 
with scars." 

"Yes. They burned me," said the tiny girl. She 
held up her hand to the scars on her face. 

"My other little boy escaped from the fire. He 
was hidden all one day in a heap of manure. He did 
not wish to make me sad by telling how his brother 
had cried out to die." 

Madame Dujon sobbed quietly and could not go 



260 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

on for a moment. The little girl put her chin on 
her little umbrella, and her eyes filled with tears. 
The Mayor of Luneville, Monsieur Keller, said 
to us: 

"Madame has not told you — the Germans finished 
off the poor child. Seeing that he was nearly dead, 
they threw him into the fire and closed the door." 



VIII 



MIRMAN AND a MES ENFANTS" 



WHEN I went across to France there was 
one man whom I wished to meet. It was 
the Prefect of the Meurthe-et-Moselle. 
I wanted to meet him because he is in charge of 
the region where German frightfulness reached its 
climax. Leon Mirman has maintained a high morale 
in that section of France which has suffered most, 
and which has cause for despair. Here it was that 
the Germans found nothing that is human alien to 
their hate. When they encountered a nun, a priest, 
or a church, they reacted to the sacred thing and 
to the religious person with desecration, violation 
and murder. But that was only because there were 
many Roman Catholics in the district. They had 
no race or religious prejudice. When they came 
to Luneville there was a synagogue and a rabbi. 
They burned the synagogue and killed the rabbi. 
As the sun falling round a helpless thing, their hate 
embraced all grades of weakness in Lorraine. In 
Nomeny they distinguished themselves by a fury 

261 



262 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

against women. In some of the villages they spe- 
cialized in pillage. Others they burned with zeal. 
Badonviller, Nonhigny, Parux, Crevic, Nomeny, 
Gerbeviller — the list of the villages of Meurthe-et- 
Moselle is a tale of the shame of Germany and of 
the suffering of France. 

But not of suffering only. At no place is France 
stronger than at this point of greatest strain. The 
district is dotted with great names of the humble — 
names unknown before the war, and now to be 
known for as long as France is France. Here Sister 
Julie held back the German Army and saved her 
wounded from the bayonet. Here the staunch 
Mayor of Luneville and his good wife stayed with 
their people through the German occupation. 

Leon Mirman is the Prefect of all this region. 
He was Director of Public Charities in Paris, but 
when war broke out he asked to be sent to the post 
of danger. So he was sent to the city of Nancy to 
rule the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. The 
Prefect of a Department in France is the same as 
the Governor of a State in America. But his office 
in peace is as nothing compared to his power in time 
of war. He can suspend a Mayor and remove an 
entire population from one village to another. The 
morale of France for that section is dependent on 
the reaction he makes to danger and stress. 

The answer of the ravaged region to the murder 



MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" 263 

and the burning is a steadiness of courage, a busy 
and sane life of normal activity. Beautiful Nancy 
still lifts her gates of gold in the Place of Stanislaus. 
The lovely light of France falls softly on the white 
stone front of the municipal buildings, and from 
their interior comes a throbbing energy that spreads 
through the hurt district. The Prefect's houses for 
refugees are admirably conducted. School "keeps" 
for the children of Pont-a-Mousson on a quiet coun- 
try road, while their mothers still live in cellars in 
the bombarded town, busy with the sewing which 
has made their home famous. They are embroider- 
ing table cloths and napkins, and Americans are 
buying their work. They are not allowed any longer 
to be happy, but they can go on creating beauty. 
None of their trouble need escape into the clean 
white linen and the delicate needle-work, and the 
Bridge of Pont-a-Mousson embosses the centerpiece 
as proudly as if the town had not been pounded by 
heavy shells for two years. 

But the parents were agreed on one thing: it was 
no place for children. So these and other hundreds 
of little ones have been brought together. The 
Prefect means that these children, some of whom 
have seen their homes burned, their mothers hunted 
by armed men, shall have the evil memory wiped 
out. He is working that they shall have a better 
chance than if the long peace had continued. The 



264 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

simple homely things are going on, as if the big 
guns could not reach in. 

I attended the classes of domestic science, where 
little girls plan menus for the family meal. Over- 
head, the aeroplanes spot the sky. Three times in 
my days in the district they came and "laid their 
eggs," in the phrase of the soldiers. Sometimes a 
mother is killed, sometimes a sister, but the peaceful 
work goes on. The blackboard is scribbled over 
with chalk. Piping voices repeat their lesson. I 
saw the tiny boys at school. I saw the older boys 
working at trades. Some of them were busy at car- 
pentry, remaking the material for their own village, 
bureaus, tables and chairs. We talked with boys 
and girls from Nomeny, where the slaughter fell on 
women with peculiar severity. These children had 
seen the Germans come in. Wherever I went I met 
children who had seen the hand grenades thrown, 
their homes burning. I visited many hundreds of 
these children at school. They are orderly and busy. 
It will take more than fire and murder from unjust 
men to spoil life for the new generation of France. 
For that insolence has released a good will in a 
greater race than the race that sought to offend these 
little ones. 

And the same care has been put on the older 
refugees. I saw the barracks of the famous Twen- 
tieth Army Corps — the Iron Divisions — and of the 



MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" 265 

Eighth Artillery used for this welfare work. Mir- 
man has taken these poor herds of refugees and re- 
stored their community life in the new temporary 
quarters. Here they have a hospital, a church and 
a cinema. He is turning the evil purpose of the 
Germans into an instrument for lifting his people 
higher than if they had known only happiness. Be- 
yond the great power and authority of his office he 
is loved. The Prefect is a good man, simple and 
high-minded. 

He has given me the statement that follows for 
the American people. Let us remember in reading 
it that it comes from the highest official in France 
in charge of the region where systematic atrocity 
was practiced in an all-inclusive way. On this 
chance section of the world's great area, a supreme 
and undeserved suffering fell. Monsieur Mirman 
makes here the first official statement of the war on 
the subject of reprisals. There is something touch- 
ing in his desire for our understanding. France 
hoped we would see her agony with the eyes she 
once turned toward us. She still hopes on, and sends 
this message of her representative : 

"I wish you to understand in what spirit we began 
the war in France, and especially in this district. It 
was our intention to follow the rules of what you 
call in English 'Fair Play.' We wished to carry on 
the war as we had carried on other wars, to our risk 



266 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

and peril, with all the loyalties of fighting men. 
But from the start we have been faced with men 
whom we are unable to consider as soldiers, who 
have conducted themselves in a section of our De- 
partment as veritable outlaws. You are not going, 
unfortunately, to Nomeny, which is a town of this 
Department where the Germans have committed 
the worst of their atrocities. At least you will go 
to Gerbeviller, where they burned the houses, one 
by one, and put to death old men, women and chil- 
dren. 

"Mention is often made of these two townships 
where the inhabitants suffered the most severely 
from the invasion of the enemy, but in many other 
townships, a long list, the Germans acted in the 
same way. They burned the streets, they killed men, 
women and children without cause. Always they 
gave the pretext, to excuse themselves, that the 
civilian population had fired on them. On that 
point, I bring you my personal testimony: I say to 
you on my honor that this German allegation is ab- 
solutely false. 

"At my request I was appointed the Prefect of 
Meurthe-et-Moselle on August 9, 1914. In all the 
townships of this Department, on my arrival, I re- 
quested in the most urgent terms that the inhabitants 
should not give way to restlessness, and should not 
resort to a single act which I called an unruly act, 



MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" 267 

by themselves taking direct part in the war. I made 
those requests in perfect agreement with all the popu- 
lation, approved by the most ardent patriots. I held 
inquiries, frequent and detailed, to find out if my 
instructions had been respected. Not once have I 
been able to establish the fact that a civilian fired 
on the Germans. 

"If isolated instances of that sort did take place, 
they could not be admitted as justifying the total 
of systematic crimes committed by the Germans, but 
I have not been able to lay hold of a single instance. 

"I will cite two incidents which will mark out 
for you, in a clear-cut way, what I believe to be "the 
French method." 

"At the beginning of the war a German aviator 
threw bombs on a town near Nancy. The Mayor, 
revolted, went to the town-hall, where the arms had 
been deposited, and took a hunting rifle and fired 
at the aviator. It is clear that the German aviator 
was committing a crime contrary to all the laws of 
war, but I held that the Mayor of that town, by 
himself firing in that way on a criminal, was dis- 
obeying the laws of his country. I proceeded to dis- 
ciplinary measures against the Mayor: I suspended 
him from office for many weeks. 

"Another incident: In the first days of August, 
1914, the Germans entering Badonviller, exasper- 
ated perhaps by the resistance which our soldiers of 



268 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

the rear-guard gave them, or simply wishing to leave 
a token of their Kultur, and to terrorize the popu- 
lation, burned part of the village, and fired on the 
inhabitants as if they were rabbits. 

"I arrived the next day. The French troops had 
reentered Badonviller and had taken some German 
soldiers prisoner. The prisoners were being led to 
the town-hall. The fires had not yet been put out, 
and the women whom the Germans had murdered 
were still unburied. 

"The Mayor had seen the terrible spectacle. He 
had seen his young wife murdered at his doorstep 
in front of her little children. He himself had suf- 
fered violence. But he had stuck to his post, and 
had continued to carry on the affairs of his town. 
While the prisoners were being led along the in- 
habitants of Badonviller, who had seen these crimes, 
recognized the prisoners and surrounded them, 
threatening them and crying out against them. The 
Mayor threw himself resolutely between the pris- 
oners and his people. This Mayor, who had had 
his own flesh and blood murdered and his heart torn, 
declared with emphasis that those prisoners, no mat- 
ter what crimes they had committed, were protected 
by the law, and that it was not permitted to any 
civilian to touch a hair of their head. 

"Because he had called to order some of his peo- 
ple whose anger was natural enough, because he had 



MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" 269 

respected the law under trying conditions, I asked 
that this Mayor should be decorated, and the French 
Government decreed for him the cross of the Legion 
of Honor. He was rewarded in this way, not for 
having carried out criminal violence according to 
the German method, but on the contrary for pre- 
venting, by coolness and force of will, reprisals made 
against enemy prisoners. 

"By these examples, and I could cite many others, 
you will be able to estimate the ideas with which 
the French began the war. 

"The French in more than one instance have run 
against, not armies, but veritable bands organized 
for crime. I say 'organized,' and that is the signifi- 
cant fact. In a war when individual accidental ex- 
cesses are committed, tragic situations, to be sure, 
arise, but we ought not to conclude that we have 
found ourselves face to face with a general organiza- 
tion of cruelty and destruction. 

"In the townships of which I am speaking, it is 
by the order of the heads that the crimes have been 
committed. They are not the crimes of individuals : 
there has been a genuine organization of murder. It 
is that which will be thrown into the light by the 
testimony which you will gather — notably at Gerbe- 
viller. 

"Then I call your attention to what the city of 



2.7o OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Nancy has suffered in violation of the laws of hu- 
manity since the beginning of the war. 

"From the beginning of August, 1914, Nancy has 
been empty of troops, the numerous barracks have 
been converted into hospitals; some were used as 
asylums for our refugees. Nothing remained at 
Nancy, nothing has come since then. You won't 
find at the present time a single cannon, a single 
depot of ammunition, no fortification, no military 
work. For a garrison there are some dozens of old 
territorials, barely sufficient in number to keep order. 

"On the Fourth of September an enemy aviator 
threw bombs on the square where the Cathedral 
stands, killing a little girl and an old man. 

"A few days later, knowing that they were not 
going to be able to enter Nancy, furious at the 
thought that they would soon be forced to retire 
and that they must give up their cherished dreams, 
in the night of the ninth and tenth of September, 
those unfortunate men advanced two pieces of artil- 
lery under cover of a storm, bombarded our peace- 
ful city, and ripped to pieces houses in various quar- 
ters of the town, murdering women and children. 

"A military point to that bombardment? I chal- 
lenge any one to state it. Act of cruelty, simply, 
an act of outlawry. 

"Ever since then acts against Nancy are multi- 
plied. The list is long of victims stricken in Nancy 



MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" 271 

by the bombs of Zeppelins, of aeroplanes, and by 
the shells of the 380, shot for now many months 
by a long-range gun. All the victims are civilians, 
mostly women and children. I repeat to you that 
the city of Nancy is empty of soldiers. 

"And what I say of Nancy is true of the other 
towns, particularly at Luneville, where a bomb fall- 
ing in the full market killed 45 persons, of whom 
40 were women. 

"Adding childishness to violence, with a craving 
for the histrionic, obsessed by the desire to strike the 
imagination (or let us say more simply having the 
souls of 'cabotins'), these outlaws have conceived 
the bombardment of Nancy by a 380 cannon on 
the first of January — New Year's, the day of gifts — 
and on the first of July. In that New Year bom- 
bardment they so arranged it that the first shell fell 
on Nancy at the last stroke of midnight. I will show 
the little furnished house which that shell crushed, 
killing six persons, of whom four were women. 

"For a long while we were content to suffer those 
crimes, protesting in the name of law. We did not 
wish to defend ourselves. We shrink from the 
thought of reprisals. But public opinion ended by 
forcing the hand of the Government. Unanimously 
the nation has demanded that, each time an unde- 
fended French town is bombarded by the Germans 
by aeroplane, Zeppelin or cannon, a reply shall be 



272 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

made to that violation of the laws of war and of the 
rights of humanity by the bombardment of a Ger- 
man town. 

"I wish to say to you, and I beg you to make it 
known to your noble nation: it is not with serenity 
that we see our French soldiers do that work. It 
is with profound sadness that we resign ourselves 
to those reprisals. Those methods of defense are 
imposed upon us. Since all considerations of hu- 
manity are to-day alien to the German soul, we are 
reduced for the protection of our wives and our chil- 
dren to the policy of reprisals and to the assassina- 
tion in our turn of the children and the women in 
Germany. The Germans have vociferously rejoiced 
in the crimes committed by their soldiers ; they have 
made an illumination for the day of the Lusitania 
crime; they have delighted in the thought that on 
the first of January the children of Nancy received, 
as New Year's presents, shells from a 380 cannon. 
The acts of reprisal to which we are forced do not 
rejoice us in the least; they sadden us. We speak 
of them with soberness. And we have here reason 
for hating Kultur all the more. We French hate 
the Germans less for the crimes which they have 
committed on us than for the acts of violence con- 
trary to the laws of war which they have forced us 
to commit in our turn, and for the reprisals on their 
children and their women. 



MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" 273 

"I thank you for having come here. You will 
look about you, you will ask questions, you will 
easily see the truth. That truth you will make 
known to your great and free nation. We shall 
await with confidence the judgment of its con- 



IX 



AN APPEAL TO THE SMALLER AMERICAN COMMUNI- 
TIES 

BURNED villages are like ruins of an ancient 
civilization. To wander through them was 
as if I were stepping among the bones of a 
dead age. Only the green fields that flowed up to 
the wrecked cottages and the handful of sober-faced 
peasants — only these were living in that belt of 
death that cuts across the face of France, like the 
scar from a whip on a prisoner's cheek. French soil 
is sacred to a Frenchman. I saw a little shop with 
pottery and earthenware in the window: vases, and 
jars, and toilet cases. The sign read: 

"La terre de nos Gres — c'est la meme terre que 
defendent nos soldats dans les tranchees." 

("The earth which made these wares is the same 
earth which our soldiers defend in the trenches.") 

I want the people at home to understand this war. 
So I am telling of it in terms that are homely. I 
asked the authorities to let me wander through the 
villages and talk with the inhabitants. What a vil- 
lage suffers, what a storekeeper suffers, will mean 

274 



AN APPEAL TO COMMUNITIES 275 

something to my friends in Iowa and Connecticut. 
Talk of artillery duels with big guns and bayonet 
charges through barbed wire falls strangely on peace- 
ful ears. But what a druggist's wife has seen, what 
a school-teacher tells, will come home to Americans 
in Eliot, Maine, and down the Mississippi Valley. 
What one cares very much to reach is the solid silent 
public opinion of the smaller cities, the towns and 
villages. The local storekeeper, the village doctor, 
the farmer, these are the men who make the real 
America — the America which responds slowly but 
irresistibly to a sound presentation of facts. The 
alert newspaper editor, the hustling real-estate man, 
the booster for a better-planned town, these citizens 
shape our public opinion. If once our loyal Middle 
Westerners know the wrong that has been done peo- 
ple just like themselves, they will resent it as each 
of us resents it that has seen it. This is no dim 
distant thing. This is a piece of cold-planned in- 
justice by murder and fire done to our friends in the 
sister republic. I should like a representative com- 
mittee from South Norwalk, Conn., Emporia, Kan- 
sas, and Sherman, Texas, to see Gerbeviller as I 
have seen it, to walk past its 475 burned houses, to 
talk with its impoverished but spirited residents. I 
should like them to catch the spirit of Sermaize, 
building its fresh little red-brick homes out of the 
rubble of the wrecked place. 



276 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

I had thought that I had some slight idea of 
French spirit. I had thought that five months with 
their soldiers at Melle, Dixmude, and Nieuport had 
given me a hint of France in her hour of greatness. 
But I found that not even the cheery first line men, 
not even the democratic officers, are the best of 
France. They are lovable and wonderful. But the 
choicest persons in France are the women in the 
devastated districts. They can make or break 
morale. What the people back of the trenches are 
feeling, the talk that they make in the village inn — 
these are the decisive factors that give heart to an 
army or that crumble its resistance. No govern- 
ment, no military staff can continue an unpopular 
war. But by these people who have lost their goods 
by fire, and their relatives by assassination, the spirit 
of France is reinforced. The war is safe in their 
hands. 

The heaviest of all the charges that rests against 
Germany is that of preparedness in equipment for 
incendiary destruction. They had not only prepared 
an army for fighting the enemy troops with rifle, 
machine-gun and howitzer. They had supplied that 
army with a full set of incendiary material for mak- 
ing war on non-combatants. Immediately on cross- 
ing the frontier, they laid waste peaceful villages by 
fire. And that wholesale burning was not accom- 
plished by extemporized means. It was done by in- 



AN APPEAL TO COMMUNITIES 277 

struments "made in Germany" before the war, in- 
struments of no value for battle, but only for prop- 
erty destruction, house by house. Their manufac- 
ture and distribution to that first German anny of 
invasion show the premeditation of the destruction 
visited on the invaded country. On his arm the 
soldier carried a rifle, in his sack the stuff for fires. 
He marched against troops and against non-com- 
batants. His war was a war of extermination. The 
army carried a chemical mixture which caught fire 
on exposure to the air, by being broken open; an- 
other chemical which fired up from a charge of pow- 
der; incendiary bombs which spread flames when 
exploded; pellets like lozenges which were charged 
with powders, and which slipped easily into the bag. 
These were thrown by the handful into the house, 
after being started by match or the gun. When the 
Germans came to a village, where they wished to 
spread terror, they burned it house by house. I have 
seen their chalk-writing on the doors of unburned 
houses. One of their phrases which they scribbled 
on those friendly doors was "Nicht anziinden." 
Now "anziinden" does not mean simply "Do not 
bum." It means "Do not burn with incendiary 
methods." Wherever a spy lived, or a peasant inn- 
keeper friendly with drinks, or wherever there was 
a house which an officer chose for his night's rest, 
there the Germans wrote the phrase that saved the 



278 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

house. The other houses to right and left were 
"burned with incendiary methods." That phrase is 
as revealing as if in a village where there were dead 
bodies of children with bayonet wounds upon them, 
you discovered one child walking around with a tag 
hung round her neck reading "Do not murder this 
little girl by bayonet." 

That military hierarchy which extends from the 
sergeant to the Emperor, controlling every male in 
Germany, came down upon Belgium and France, 
prepared to crush, not alone the military power, but 
every spiritual resource of those nations. I have 
a bag of German incendiary pastilles given me by 
Jules Gaxotte, Mayor of Revigny. On one side is 
inked 

6 



0.25. 
On the other side 

6. 10.10.111. 



R.12/1, 
indicating the company and the regiment and the 
division. The pellets are square, the size of a finger- 
nail. They burn with intensity, like a Fourth of 
July torch. That little bag has enough bits of lively 
flame in it, to burn an ancient church and destroy a 
village of homes. Packets like it have seared the 



AN APPEAL TO COMMUNITIES 279 

northern provinces of France. Not one of those 
millions of pellets that came down from Germany 
was used against a soldier. Not one was used 
against a military defense. All were used against 
public buildings and homes. All were used against 
non-combatants, old men, women and children. The 
clever chemist had cooperated with the General Staff 
in perfecting a novel warfare. The admirable or- 
ganization had equipped its men for the new task 
of a soldier. In their haste the Germans left these 
pellets everywhere along the route. The Mayor of 
Revigny has a collection. So has the Mayor of 
Clermont. Monsieur Georges Payelle, premier presi- 
dent de la Cour des Comptes, and head of the French 
Government Inquiry, has a still larger collection. 
These three gentlemen have not told me, but have 
shown me this evidence. The purpose of the Ger- 
man military can be reconstructed from that one 
little bag which I hold. 

But not only have the Germans dropped their 
scraps of evidence as they went along, as if they 
were playing hare-and-hounds. They have put into 
words what they mean. The German War Book, 
issued to officers, outlines their new enlarged war- 
fare. 

Madame Dehan of Gerbeviller said to me : 
"A high officer arrived this same day (when she 
was prisoner) and said : 



280 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

" Tt is necessary to put to death the people here. 
They must be shot. This nation must disappear.' " 

Monsieur Guilley of Nomeny told me how- 
Charles Michel, a boy of seventeen, was killed. He 
said: "A patrol of scouts, composed of six Bavar- 
ians, said: 'We are going down there to kill, yes, 
kill all the people of Nomeny. , 

"Arrived at Nomeny, they asked where the farm 
was. They then came along the side of the farm 
where there was a little door. Three entered there, 
the other three came around by the big door. We 
were ready for supper, sitting around a table. We 
heard blows on blows of the bayonets before the 
doors, with cries and exclamations in German. They 
came into the place where we were sitting to eat, 
and placed themselves facing us, with nothing to 
say. They took all that they wanted from the table. 
Five of them left, going by a way in front of the 
farm. The sixth stayed there, ruminating and 
thinking. I believed that he was meditating to him- 
self a crime, but I thought to myself, 'They wouldn't 
kill a man as they would kill a rabbit.' 

"We went into the kitchen. The man was always 
there. I closed the door. Two men of my farm 
were eating in the kitchen. Now, from the kitchen 
leading into the stable there was a door. The little 
Michel went out by this door. He did not see the 
German who was there. The soldier fired at him. 



AN APPEAL TO COMMUNITIES 281 

I heard the rifle shot go. Then I saw the man fol- 
lowing the same way that the others had taken, to 
rejoin them at a trot." 

"How long did he remain there thinking before 
he accomplished his crime?" we asked. 

"Plenty long, a good quarter of an hour. He was 
a Bavarian, big and strong." 

I find that strange racial brooding and melancholy 
in the diary of a sub-officer of the Landwehr. On 
September 3, 1914, he writes: 

"It is well enough that Germany has the advan- 
tage everywhere up to the present; I am not able 
to conquer a singular impression, a presentiment that, 
in spite of all that, the end will be bad." 

In his case it is accompanied by horror at the 
wrong-doing of his comrades, a noble pity for wasted 
France. But in others, that brooding turned to sud- 
den cruelty. Any act, however savage, is a relief 
from that dark inner burden. 

Madame Dauger of Gondrecourt-Aix (Meuse) 
said to me : 

"On the night of Christmas, 1914, with fixed 
bayonets they came to get us to dance with them — 
the dances were entirely unseemly. Ten persons 
were forced out to dance. We danced from five in 
the evening till half past six." 

"Were they soldiers or officers'?" 

"Only officers; and when they were sufficiently 



282 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

drunk, we made the most of that advantage to save 
ourselves." 

It was Christmas night — the time to dance. So 
they chose partners, by the compulsion of the bayo- 
net, with the women of an invaded and outraged 
race. The same rich, childlike sentiment floods their 
eyes with tears at thought of the mother at home. 
Cruel, sentimental, melancholy, methodical, they are 
a race that needs wise leadership. And they have 
not received that. They have been led by men who 
do not believe in them. Every evil trait has been 
played upon, to the betrayal of the simple rather 
primitive personality, which in other hands would 
have gone gently all its days. But the homely good- 
ness has been stultified, and we have a race, of our 
own stock, behaving like savages under the cool 
guidance of its masters. 

The next piece of testimony was given me by a 
woman who was within a few days of giving birth 
to a child by a German father. I withhold her name 
and the name of her village. 

"I was maltreated by them, Monsieur. They 
abused me. Last year in the month of October, 
1915, they arrived. I was learning how to take care 
of the cattle, to help my father, who already had 
enough with what the Germans required him to do 
outside in the fields. My father had not returned; 
I was entirely alone. I was in the bottom of the 



AN APPEAL TO COMMUNITIES 283 

barn ; my children were in the house with my mother. 
They were upon me; I did not see them. They 
threw me down and held me. They were the sol- 
diers who lodged with my parents. I cried out three 
or four times for some one to come, but it was fin- 
ished. I got up from the straw." 

"Have you told your parents or any one*?" 

"No. Never to a person, Monsieur. I am too 
much ashamed. But I always think of it. My eldest 
child is eleven years old, the next seven years, the 
third six years, and the last I have had since the 
war. The one I wait for now, of course, I do not 
count on bringing up." 

Monsieur Mirman, the Prefect, replied : 

"Since you must have him, you will tell me at 
the time, so that I may take action and give you 
assistance." 

Through the courtesy of Mrs. Charles Prince, I 
spent an afternoon with a French nurse, Marie Lou- 
ise Vincent, of Launois, in the Ardenne. 

The Germans came. She was on the road, one 
hundred yards away, when she saw this : 

"I saw an old French beggar, whom everybody 
knew, hobbling down the road. He passed through 
our village every week. He was called "Pere Noel" 
(Father Christmas) because of his big beard. He 
was seventy-five years old. It was the 29th of Au- 
gust, about 8 o'clock in the morning. Officers or- 



284 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

dered twelve men to step out from the ranks. They 
took the old man and tied him to a tree. An officer 
ordered the men to shoot. One or two of the sous- 
officers fired when the men fired. So they shot Pere 
Noel. The villagers found thirteen bullet holes in 
him. 

"That day the soldiers burned the first four houses 
of our village. They made a big blaze, and if the 
wind had turned the whole village would have 
burned. 

"The commander came to our hospital. He pat- 
ted me on the cheek and said he had a big daughter 
at home like me, and she was in Red Cross work 
like me." 

"He said he was very thirsty. I gave him three 
glasses of water. I had good wine in the cellar, but 
not for him. He talked with the doctor and me. 
He asked for the Burgomaster. We said he had 
gone away. He asked for those next in authority 
to the Burgomaster. We said they had gone away. 

" 'Why? Why?' asked the commander. The 
Belgians have told you we are barbarians, that is 
why. We have done things a little regrettable, but 
we were forced to it by the Belgians. The colonel 
whose place I took was killed by a little girl, four- 
teen years old. She fired at him point-blank. We 
shot the girl and burned the village.' 

"Then the French doctor with me asked the com- 



AN APPEAL TO COMMUNITIES 285 

mander why his men had burned the four farm- 
houses. They were making a bright blaze with their 
barns of hay. We could see it. 

" 'Why, that — that's nothing,' said the com- 
mander. ('Ce n'est rien. C'est tout petit peu.') 

"A sous-officer came in to our hospital. He 
showed us a bottle of Bordeaux which he had taken 
from the cellar of one of our houses. He said : 

" 'I know it is good wine. I sold it myself to the 
woman a couple of months ago. I thought she 
wouldn't have had time to drink it all up.' 

" 'You know France?' asked the doctor. 

" 'I know it better than many Frenchmen,' re- 
plied the officer. 'For eight years I have been a wine 
agent in the Marne district.' 

" 'At Rheims?' 

" 'At Rheims.' 

" 'For the house of Pommery < ?' 

" 'No, no. Not that house.' 

"After the fighting of August 27 and 28, some 
of the peasants began to come back to their homes. 
Near us at the little village of Thin-le-Moutier a 
few returned. Nine old men and boys came back 
on the morning of the 29th. The Germans put them 
against a wall and shot them. I saw traces of blood 
on the wall and bullet marks. The youngest boy 
was too frightened to stand quietly against the wall. 
He struggled. So they tied him to a signpost. I 



286 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

saw traces of his blood on the post. The old 
sacristan of the village church was forced to witness 
the shooting. The bodies were guarded by a senti- 
nel for three days. On the third day, August 31, 
a German officer ordered an old man and his wife, 
of the place, to bring a cart. They carried the bod- 
ies to the graveyard. The officer had the two old 
people dig one deep hole. The old man asked per- 
mission to take out the bodies, one by one. But the 
officer had the cart upturned, and the bodies, all to- 
gether, dumped into the hole. 

A few days later a poor woman came along the 
road, asking every one she met if anybody had seen 
her boys. They were among the nine that had been 
shot. 

"A sous-officer, a Jew named Goldstein, a second 
lieutenant, came to our hospital. While our French 
doctor was held downstairs Lieutenant Goldstein 
took out the medical notes about the cases from the 
pocket of the doctor's military coat. I protested. I 
said that it was not permitted by international law. 

" 'What do you make of the convention of 
Geneva?' I asked him. 

" 'Ah, I laugh at it,' he answered. "He was a 
professor of philosophy at Darmstadt." 

With all the methodical work of murder and de- 
struction the figure of the officer in command is al- 
ways in the foreground. 



AN APPEAL TO COMMUNITIES 287 

The Cure of Gerbeviller said to me : 

"They ordered me to go on my knees before the 
major. As I did not go down on the ground, an 
officer, who was there, quickly gave me a blow with 
the bayonet in the groin. 

" 'Your parishioners are the traitors, the assassins; 
they have fired on our soldiers with rifles; they are 
going to get fire, all of your people,' the major said 
to me. 

"I replied, No, that was not possible, that at Ger- 
beviller there were only old men, women, and chil- 
dren. 

" f No, I have seen them; the civilians have fired. 
Without doubt, it is not you who have fired, but it 
is you who have organized the resistance; it is you 
who have excited the patriotism of your parishioners, 
above all, among your young men. Why have you 
taught your young men the use of arms ?' 

"Without giving me time to respond, they led 
me away. They took me to the middle of the street 
in front of my house, with five of my poor old ones. 
A soldier was going to find a tent cord and tie us 
all together. They did not permit me to go into 
my house. They brought out afterwards before me 
five other of my parishioners, as well as three little 
chasseurs a pied that they were going to make pris- 
oners. We waited there an hour. I saw passing a 



288 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

group of five of my people tied. I thought : What 
is going to happen to them^ 

"At that moment a captain on horseback arrived 
in front of us, reined up his horse in excitement, 
pulled his foot out of the stirrup and kicked our 
chasseurs in the groin. One of my people who was 
with me cried out : 'Oh, the pigs . . . ' " 
• The Great German Staff believe these things are 
buried deep in burned cottages and village graves. 
They believe an early peace will wipe out the 
memory of that insolence. They have forgotten the 
thousands of eye-witnesses, of whom I have met 
some dozens, and of whom I am one. They cannot 
kill us who live to tell what we have seen them do. 
They cannot destroy a thousand diaries of German 
soldiers that tell the abominations they committed. 
This record will become a part of history. They 
thought to wipe out their cruelty in success. But 
the names of their victims are known, and the cir- 
cumstance of their death. Not in China alone have 
they made their face a horror for a thousand years, 
but wherever there is respect for weakness and pity 
for little children. 



THE EVIDENCE 

I HAVE told in these chapters of the peasants of 
Northern France, and I have given their life 
in war in their own words. I want to tell here 
how this material was gathered, because the power 
of its appeal rests on the recognition of its accuracy. 
A small part of the testimony I followed in long 
hand as it was spoken. The rest, three-quarters of 
the total testimony, was taken down in short-hand 
by one or the other of two stenographers. I have 
used about one-fifth of the collected material. 

My companions were the well-known American 
writers, Will Irwin and Herbert Corey. Other com- 
panions have been Lieutenant Louis Madelin, the 
distinguished historian, whose work on the French 
Revolution was crowned by the French Academy; 
Lieutenant Jules Basdevant, Professor of Interna- 
tional Law at the University of Grenoble ; Lieuten- 
ant Monod, once of Columbia University, and al- 
ways a friend of our country; Captain Callet, Pro- 
fessor of Geography at Saint-Cyr, now of the Etat 

289 



290 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Major of the Third Army; and the Baron de la 
Chaise. I don't wish to imply that the French Army 
is exclusively composed of scholarly gentlemen with 
an established position in the world of letters. But 
it happened to be the good pleasure of the French 
Minister of War and of the Foreign Office to make 
of our trips a delightful social experience. Most 
important, these men are worthy witnesses of the 
things I have seen, and the statements I have re- 
corded. 

In the civil world the corroborating witnesses are 
equally authoritative. I was accompanied, for much 
of the territory visited, by Leon Mirman, Prefect 
of the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. 

It is no easy job to penetrate the war zone, wan- 
der through villages at leisure, and establish rela- 
tions of confidence with the peasants. The whole 
experience would have been impossible but for the 
help of Emile Hovelaque. This distinguished es- 
sayist, Director of Public Education, went with us 
to all the villages. The success of the visit was 
due to him. He understands American public opin- 
ion more accurately than any other man whom I 
have met abroad. His human sympathy wins the 
peasants. A woman brought me her burned grand- 
daughter, five years old. A mother brought me the 
cap of her fourteen-year-old son, and the rope with 
which the Germans had hanged him. A woman told 



THE EVIDENCE 291 

me how her mother, seventy-eight years old, was 
shot before her eyes. I could not have had their 
stories, I should not have been permitted to enter 
these secret places of their suffering, if it had not 
been for Monsieur Hovelaque. 

The pain it cost them to tell these things I shall 
not forget. There was one decent married woman, 
within a few weeks of the birth of her child by a 
German father, who had been outraged by German 
soldiers. She had never before told her story, be- 
cause of the shame of it. She had not told her 
parents nor her sister. I cannot forget that she told 
it to me. I cannot rest easily till her suffering and 
the suffering of the others with whom I have been 
living for two years means something to my people 
at home. I have kept all personal feeling out of 
my record. It would have been unforgivable if, 
in rendering the ruin of Lorraine, I had given way 
to anger. But this I have not done. I have only 
added many days of detailed work on evidence that 
was already conclusive. But this coolness of re- 
porting does not mean that I think these details of 
cruelty should leave us detached spectators. 

Let us remember these peasants when the Allies 
advance to the Rhine. Let us remember them when 
Belgium is indemnified, when Alsace and Lorraine 
are cut loose, when the German military power is 
crushed, when the individual officers who ordered 



292 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

these acts are singled out for the extremity of pun- 
ishment. We must teach our memory not to forget. 
Certain German officers must be executed. Gen- 
eral Clauss must be executed. He has left a trail 
of blood. The officers in command of the 17th 
and the 60th Bavarian Regiments, who slaughtered 
the women, the children and the old men of Gerbe- 
viller, must be executed. The officers of the 2nd 
and 4th Regiments of Bavarian Infantry, who mur- 
dered fifty men, women and children of Nomeny, 
in a cold, methodical hate, with a peculiar care for 
the women, must be executed. 

In the closing passages of Browning's "Ring and 
the Book," the aged prelate, about to go before his 
maker, is confronted with the task of giving judg- 
ment. Count Guido, intelligent and powerful, had 
murdered Pompilia and her parents. He did it by 
the aid of four assassins. Pope Innocent, eighty-six 
years old, is called on to decide whether the five 
guilty men shall be killed for their evil doings. 
Friends urge him to be merciful. The aged Pope 
replies : 

How it trips 

Silvery o'er the tongue. "Remit the death ! 

Forgive . . . 

Herein lies the crowning cogency 

That in this case the spirit of culture speaks, 

Civilization is imperative. 

Give thine own better feeling play for once ! 



THE EVIDENCE 293 

Mercy is safe and graceful . . . 
Pronounce, then, for our breath and patience fail." 
"I will, sirs : but a voice other than yours 
Quickens my spirit. Quis pro Domino? 
'Who is upon the Lord's side ?' " 

So he orders that Count Guido and his henchmen 
be killed on the morrow. 

"Enough, for I may die this very night 
And how should I dare die, this man let live ?" 



rri 



XI 

SISTER JULIE 

HIS is the story of Sister Julie. The Ger- 
mans entered her village of Gerbeviller, 
where she was head of the poor-house and 
hospital. As they came southward through the 
place they burned every house on every street, 475 
houses. In a day they wiped out seven centuries 
of humble village history. In her little street they 
burned Numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12, but they 
did not burn Number 14, the house where Sister 
Julie lived. There they stopped, for she stopped 
them. And the twenty houses beyond her hospital 
still stand, because that August day there was a 
great woman in that little village. They killed 
men, women and children throughout the village, 
but they did not kill the thirteen French wounded 
soldiers whom she was nursing, nor the five Roman 
Catholic sisters whom she directed as Mother Su- 
perior. Outside of a half dozen generals, she is per- 
haps the most famous character whom the war has 
revealed, and one of the greatest personages whom 

294 




The first woman of France : the peasant Sister Julie, 
wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. She held up 
the German Army and saved the wounded French in her 
hospital. 



SISTER JULIE 295 

France has produced: even France in her long his- 
tory. The last days of Gerbeviller live in her story. 
I write her account word for word as she gives it. 
Her recital is touched with humor in spite of the 
horror that lay heaped around her. She raises the 
poignard of the German Colonel: you see it held 
over her head ready to strike. By pantomime she 
creates the old paralytic men, the hobbling women, 
the man who went "fou." 

Because she remained through the days of fire and 
blood, and succored his troops, General Castelnau 
cited her in an Order of the Day. The Legion of 
Honor has placed its scarlet ribbon on the black 
of her religious dress. The great of France — the 
President and the Premier, senators and poets — 
have come to see her where she still lives on in the 
ruins of the little village. 

Amelie Rigard, whose religious name is Sister 
Julie, is a peasant woman, sixty-two years old, be- 
longing to the Order of Saint Charles of Nancy. 
She is of the solid peasant type, with square chin 
and wide brown eyes. Everything about her is com- 
pact, deep-centered, close-growing; the fingers are 
stubby, the arms held closely to the body, and when 
the gesture comes it is a strong pushing out from 
the frame, as if pushing away a weight. When- 
ever she puts out power, she seems to be delivering 
a straight blow with the full weight of the body. 



296 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

With Sister Julie it is not only a genius of simple 
goodness. She carries a native shrewdness, with a 
salient tang. She knows life. This is no meek per- 
son, easily deceived by people, thinking every one 
good and harmless. She reads motives. Power is 
what I feel in her — direct, sheer power. The won- 
der is not that she rose to one of the supreme crises 
of history, and did a work which has passed into the 
consciousness of France. The wonder is that she 
remained hidden in a country village for sixty-two 
years. Her gift of language, her strength of na- 
ture, had vitality enough to burn through obscurity. 
The person she made me think of was that great 
man whom I once knew, Dwight Moody. Here was 
the same breadth of beam, the simplicity, the knowl- 
edge of human nature, the same native instinct for 
the fitting word that comes from being fed on the 
greatest literature in the world, and from using the 
speech of powerful, uneducated persons. When she 
entered the room, the room was filled. When she 
left, there was a vacancy. 

Here follows the account in her own words, of 
the last days of Gerbeviller. The phrase that speaks 
through all her recital is "feu et sang" "fire and 
blood." The Germans said on entering that they 
would give "fire and blood" to the village. The 
reason was this: A handful of French chasseurs, 
about sixty in number, had held up the German 



SISTER JULIE 



297 



Army for several hours, in order to give the French 
Army time to retreat. This battle had taken place 
at the bridge outside the village. When at last 
the Germans broke through, they were irritated by 
the firm resistance which had delayed their plans. 
So they vented their ill-will by burning the houses 
and murdering the peasants. 

SISTER JULIE'S STORY 

The Germans reached the Luneville road at the 
entrance of Gerbeviller at 10 minutes after seven 
in the morning. They saw the barricades, for our 
troops had built a barricade, and they said to a 
woman, Madame Barthelemy: 

"Madame, remove the barricades." As she waited 
undecided for a few seconds, they said : 

"You refuse. Then fire and blood." 

They then began to set fire to all the houses and 
they shot six men. They threw a man into an oven, 
a baker, Joseph Jacques, a fine fellow of fifty years 
of age, married, with children. It was necessary 
to eat, even at Gerbeviller, and it was necessary 
to work out a way to make bread. The former baker 
had been mobilized, and his good old papa was in- 
firm and unable to work. So Monsieur Jacques was 
busy at this time with the baking. They killed him 
when they came. It was about eight o'clock in the 



298 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

morning. The fires of the oven had already started. 

For a long time I did not believe it, but I have 
had a confirmation since. You will see how by what 
follows. When there was an attack in Champagne, 
a youth of Gerbeviller, Florentin, whose father was 
the gardener at the chateau, found himself in front 
of certain Germans who wished to give themselves 
up as prisoners. He looked at them, and said: 

"You are not 'Comrades' ( 'Kamerade' is the word 
the German calls out when he surrenders). You 
know what you did at Gerbeviller. So don't call 
yourselves 'Comrades.' " 

A German said to him, "It was I who flung the 
man into the oven. I was ordered to do it, or else 
I should have been 'kaput.' " (This is slang for a 
"dead one"). 

A search was then made, and in the oven was 
found the thigh bone of the unfortunate baker. 

I have seen many other things. I have seen a 
man, Barthelemy of Chanteheux. I have seen that 
man spread out spitted on the ground by a bayonet. 

Here is what they have done. It was half-past 
six in the evening. I heard their fifes. Our little 
chasseurs had retreated. The Germans had made 
fire and blood all the day long. I saw them and 
watched them well in this street. I was at the door. 
Yes, there were six of us at this door. They put 
fire to the houses, house by house, shouting as they 



SISTER JULIE 299 

burned them. Picture to yourself a human wave, 
where the bank has been broken down. They poured 
into the street precipitately, with their "lightning 
conductors," which shone brilliant in the sun (the 
point of their helmets). They sat down, seven and 
eight in front of a house. They kept going by in 
great numbers, but these who were ordered remained 
behind in front of each house. There these sat be- 
fore the houses, while those others went past with- 
out a word. They put their knapsacks on the 
ground. They took out something that looked like 
macaroni. They hurled it into the house. There 
wasn't a pane of glass left in our windows, because 
of the pom-pom of cannon on the Fraimbois road. 
I saw them ordered to go on with their work of firing 
the houses, when they coolly stopped for a tiny 
minute to talk. Then, afresh, I saw them look in 
their knapsacks, and next I heard a detonation. But 
it was not a detonation like that of the report of 
a rifle or revolver. This was like the crackle of 
powder priming, of crackers, if you prefer. They 
were incendiary pastilles which they had thrown into 
the fire to hasten the destruction. At the end of 
a few minutes the fire picked up with greater in- 
tensity, and directly the roofs broke in one after 
the other with a crash. Many of our people did 
not see the burning, because they stayed in the eel- 



300 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

lars, lying hidden there, frightened, under the rub- 
bish. 

In one of the burning houses a woman was liv- 
ing in her room on the first floor. Two Germans 
came to our house and said : 

"My sister, come quick and look for a woman 
who is in the fire." 

The woman was Madame Zinius. It is our sis- 
ters who went there at their risk and peril. 

The Germans had their destruction organized. In 
all the well-to-do houses they began by plundering. 
They did not burn these as they passed. 

A few minutes later we saw five or six vehicles 
draw up, the "Guimbardes," vans, for plundering 
and carrying away the linen and the clothing. 
Women came with these vans, young women, well 
dressed, rich enough. They were not "bad." 

[When the Germans captured a town, their organ- 
ization of loot was sometimes carried out by women, 
who brought up motor lorries, which the soldiers 
filled with the plunder from the larger houses, and 
which the women then drove away. Sometimes 
these women were dressed as Red Cross nurses. I 
can continue the proof by other witnesses elsewhere 
than in Gerbeviller. The organization of murder, 
arson and pillage is participated in by German men 
and women.] 

Monsieur Martin had at his place many sewing- 



SISTER JULIE 301 

machines, with the trade-mark Victoria. The Ger- 
mans carried them away. 

I have told you that they threw persons into the 
fire. Monsieur Pottier was forced back into the fire. 
His wife moaned and called for help. 

"Help me get my husband out of the fire," she 
cried. 

"Go die with him," they answered her, and she, 
too, was pushed into the flames. 

"They" kept coming on, playing the fife. We 
awaited them at the door. Only thirteen wounded 
French soldiers had stayed with us. They had been 
scattered through the different rooms. But we put 
them up in one room in order to simplify the service 
and give them a bit of "coddling." 

We saw four officers on horseback approach. 
They dismounted in front of our town-hall, twenty 
meters away. They entered the building, and there 
they put everything upside down. They tumbled 
out all the waste paper, the entire office desk, deter- 
mined to find the records. 

They remounted and rode up in front of our 
house. They sat there looking at us for a moment. 
They had the manner guttural and hard, which is the 
German way. They began speaking German. 
When they showed signs of listening to my reply, 
I said to them : 

"Speak French. That is the least courtesy you 



302 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

can show me. Speak French, I beg of you, and I 
will answer you." 

"You have French soldiers hidden in your house 
with their arms," said one of them. 

And he tramped hither and thither like a mad- 
man, and he sputtered and clattered. (Et il se 
promenait de long en large comme un fou, et il bavait 
et degoisait.) 

I answered : 

"We have no French soldiers here " 

The German: "You have French soldiers. " 

"Yes, we have French soldiers, but they are 
wounded. They have no arms." 

One of them, mighty, with a truculent air, pulled 
out his sword. 

"They have their arms," he shouted, and he 
brandished his sword. 

"They won't hurt you. Enter," I said. 

A Lorraine to say to a German "Enter," that 
means mischief. (Un Lorraine dire a un Allemand 
"Entrez": Que eel a fait mal!) 

Two of the officers dismounted. Each of them 
hid a dagger somewhere in his breast. That thought 
that they could harm my poor little wounded men 
made me turn my look a few seconds on the action. 
And as they took out their revolvers at the same 
time, I did not see where they had hidden the dag- 
gers. 



SISTER JULIE 303 

The finger on the trigger, they nodded their head 
for me to go on in front of them. I went in front 
and led the way into this room where there was 
nothing but four walls, and no furniture except the 
thirteen beds of my wounded. I entered by this 
door, not knowing in the least what they wanted 
to do. Imagine this room with the first bed here, 
and then the second here, et cetera, et cetera. I went 
automatically to the first and, more involuntarily 
still, placed my hand on the bed of wounded Num- 
ber One, a dragoon wounded by a horse. 

See, now, what took place: the imposing one of 
them walked in with his dagger in his left hand 
(son poignard, la gauche) ; the other man with 
his revolver was there, ready. With his dag- 
ger in his left hand, the first man stripped the 
bed for its full length, lifting the sheet, the coverlet 
and the bedclothes. He looked down in a manner 
evil, malevolent, ill-natured (mechante, malveil- 
lante, mauvaise). 

No response from the wounded men. 

He did not say anything when he had seen what 
he wished to see. He stepped up to the head of the 
wounded man. I made a half turn toward him. I 
was separated from him by our wounded man who 
was between the two of us. 

He said to my poor unfortunate, with a harsh 
gesture : 



304 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

"You and your men, you make our wounded suf- 
fer on the battlefield. You cut off their ears. You 
put out their eyes. You make them suffer." 

Still no response. (Pas reponse encore.) 

When I saw the state of mind he was in, I went 
round at once on the left side of the wounded, and 
I said: 

"This is a wounded man, and this place is the 
Red Cross. Here we do well for all and ill for 
none, and if you mean well, do not hurt us. Leave 
us in peace as you do everywhere else. We will 
nurse your wounded and nurse them well." 

He had turned around to watch the smoke of the 
fires which was pouring into the room through that 
opening, and he stood there several seconds with set 
face. 

My little wounded men hardly ventured to 
breathe. Seeing that calm, that brooding which did 
not bode anything good, I exerted myself to repeat 
once more: 

"If you mean well, do not hurt us. We will nurse 
your wounded." 

And, at last, to help him come out of his speech- 
lessness : 

"See, there, everything is on fire over there." 

He answered me : 

"We are not barbarians. No, we are not bar- 
barians. And if the civilians had not fired on us 



SISTER JULIE 305 

with rifles, we should not have had any burning 
here." 

"Those were not civilians. Those were soldiers." 

"Civilians," he said. 

"No. No. No. Soldiers." 

"Civilians," he repeated; "I know well what I am 
saying. I saw them." 

He made a gesture to show me that men had fired, 
while he cried in my ears with all his might 
"Civilians." 

He went in front of me, and stripped the second 
bed. I feared that he might speak to my wounded, 
and I thought I should do well if I placed myself 
at the head of each of the beds as he uncovered them. 
I stepped between the two beds, and I feared what 
would come of it all. In this way I made the round 
of the room with them, standing at each of the thir- 
teen points, always placing myself at the pillow of 
each wounded man, while "they" advanced bed by 
bed, and cautiously. 

I did not know how they had arranged their 
weapons, but it seemed to me that they always had 
their finger placed on the trigger. 

The second man with his revolver held his gun a 
Utile low. 

I followed them, shutting the door, when they 
went to the Infirmary of the old men. They did 
not say anything and they did not promise that they 



306 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

would not set fire to us. How should I go about get- 
ting that promise? 

A third time I asked them : 

"It is clearly understood that we shall nurse 
your wounded, and that you will not burn this 
house." 

"They" start to leave, and go toward the door, 
walking slowly. When the chief was just leaving, 
I said again to him : 

"It is clearly understood that you will not harm 
us nor burn our house." 

"No, no." 

I looked to see if he gave the order to any of his 
soldiers. I didn't see that, but I noticed one of our 
sisters who was drawing a wheelbarrow with an old 
man in it, who weighed at least seventy-five kilos 
and who was paralyzed. 

"Where are you going?" I asked her. 

"Over there; the soldiers tell me that they are 
coming to set fire to the hospital," she replied. "One 
of our old men cried out to me, 'My sister, do not 
make us stay here. Let us go and die in peace, since 
they are killing everybody here. We would rather 
leave and die of hunger in the fields.' So I said, 
'Come along, then.' " 

For the moment I am all alone in this room with 
my thirteen wounded men. I said to myself, "My 



SISTER JULIE 307 

God, what will become of me all alone in the midst 
of fire and blood." 

I stood a few seconds in the doorway and then 
went in to see our little soldiers. 

"My poor children, I ask your forgiveness for 
bringing in such a visitation, but I assure you that 
I thought my last quarter hour had come. I thought 
they were going to kill us all." 

"My sister, stay with us," they said; "stay with 
us." 

"I will bear the impossible, my children, to save 
your life." 

I remained there a few minutes, and then two 
German soldiers presented themselves with fixed 
bayonets. I stepped down the two stairs; see what 
an escort was there for me ! 

"Why is this house shut up? There are French 
in it, lying hidden with their arms." 

"The owner has been mobilized, and so has gone 
away. His wife and children have gone away." 

They kept on insisting: "The French. Hidden. 
In there." 

They indicated the place with a gesture. 

I thought to myself, What is happening? What 
will they do? Here are the men who will set fire 
to the house. 

"Why will you set fire to this house?" I asked. 
"Your chiefs don't wish it. They have promised me 



308 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

that they won't burn here. You want to set fire 
here out of excitement (par contagion). Will you 
put out the fire?" 

I said again to them: 

"It is wicked to set fire here, because we shall 
nurse your wounded." 

While this was going on, our sisters upstairs were 
not able to subdue the poor father Prevost. He is 
an old man of eighty-eight years, partly paralyzed in 
leg and arm. I was at the doorway. I heard him 
call out: 

"They shoved me into the fire. They have gone 
away and left me. I am going to fall out of the 
window." 

I climbed to the fourth floor of the house where 
he was, to try to attract him away, but he did not 
wish to come. He was foolish. I knew that he was 
fond of white sugar. I went up to him and showed 
him the sugar. I took his jacket and put his snow- 
boots on him, so that he could get away more 
quickly. You know those boots which fasten by 
means of two or three buckles, very primitive, and 
which are so speedily put on. At last I led him to 
the edge of the doorway here. 

The Germans saw him and said : "It is a lunatic 
asylum, don't you see?" so they said to each other. 
"They want to kill the sisters. There is no need of 
going into that house. It is a lunatic asylum." 



SISTER JULIE 309 

That is the reason, I believe, why they didn't 
come into the house during the night. They en- 
tered the chapel of the hospital. 

While I was with the Germans, some of their like 
had come to our Infirmary to say : 

"You must leave here because we are going to set 
fire." 

They then said to the old people: 

"We have orders to burn the Infirmary." 

Among the number we had the poor mother 
Andre, Monsieur Porte, who walked hobbling like 
this; Monsieur Georget, who is hung on only one 
wire, and Monsieur Leroy, who isn't hung on any 
(qui ne tenait qu'a un fil, Monsieur Leroy qui ne 
tenait plus non plus). 

[Sister Julie limped across the room. She bent 
her back double. She went feeble. In swift panto- 
mime she revealed each infirmity of the aged people. 
She created the picture of a flock of sick and crippled 
sheep driven before wolves. ] 

At four o'clock they were led away to Mareville. 
Those of whom I tell you died in the course of the 
year. Death came likewise to seven others who 
would not have died but for that. 

The next morning we had German wounded. No 
one to care for them. What to do? I said to a 
wounded Lieutenant-Colonel : 



310 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

"You have given us many wounded to tend. 
Where are your majors'?" 

See what he answered me. "They have aban- 
doned us." 

That evening this Lieutenant-Colonel said to me 
in a rough voice : 

"Some bread, my sister." 

"You haven't any bread 1 ?" I said. "You have 
burned our bakery and killed our baker in it. You 
have burned our butcher shop with our butcher in 
it. And now you have no bread and no meat. Eat 
potatoes as we have to." 

He was hit in the calf of the leg, but the leg bone 
was not touched, nor the femur; it was not a severe 
wound. He unrolled his bandage and showed me 
his treatment, assuming an air of pain. 

"Aie! Aie!" he cried. 

Ah! "They" are more soft (douillets) than our 
poor little French. I began to dress his leg. 

"It is terrible, my sister, this war. Terrible for 
you and for us also. If the French were the least bit 
intelligent, they would ask for peace at once. Bel- 
gium is ours. In three days we shall be at Paris." 

The bandage tightened on his wound. "Ah," he 
said. 

I replied to him: "It is your Kaiser who is the 
cause of all this." 

"Oh, no. Not the Kaiser. The Kaiser. Oh, the 



SISTER JULIE 311 

Kaiser." As he pronounced the word "Kaiser," he 
seemed to be letting something very good come out 
of his mouth, as if he were savoring it. 

The bandage went round once more. "Ah," he 
said. 

"It is then his son, the Crown Prince, who is re- 
sponsible*?" I continued. 

"Not at all. Not at all; it is France." 

"France is peace-loving," I replied. 

"It is Serbia, because the Austrian Archduke was 
killed by a Serbian." 

The 29th or 30th of the month shells fell occa- 
sionally over our roof. My famous wounded Ger- 
man was frightened. 

"My sister, I must be carried to the cellar at once." 

"There's no danger. The French never fire on the 
Red Cross," I said to him. 

"I am a poor wounded man. So carry me to the 
cellar." 

I gave in. I carried him to the cellar, and he 
stayed there some days. 



XII 

SISTER JULIE CONTINUED 

DURING the days of fire and blood Sister 
Julie was acting mayor of Gerbeviller. It 
was no light job, for she had to steer an 
invading army away from her hospital of wounded 
men, and she was the source of courage for the vil- 
lage of peasants, who were being hunted and tor- 
tured. Many months have passed, and nothing is 
left of those days but crumbled stone and village 
graves and an everlasting memory. But she is still 
the soul of Gerbeviller. Pilgrims come to her from 
the provinces of France, and give her money for her 
poor and sick. The village still has need of her. I 
saw her with the woman whose aged mother was 
shot before her eyes, and with the mother whose little 
boy was murdered. 

She went on with her story : 

SISTER JULIE'S STORY 

As soon as the Germans came they began their 
work by taking hostages, the same number as that 

312 



SISTER JULIE 313 

of the municipal councilors. They led them all 
away to the end of town by the bridge, on the road 
which leads to Rambervillers. A German passed, 
and when he saw them he shouted out : 

"See the flock of sheep. They are taking you 
away to be shot." And he pointed out to them with 
his fingers the place of their torment. 

In the morning four or five officers arrived to hear 
testimony from some of the men. It was Leonard, 
the grocer, who told me that four persons were ques- 
tioned. 

"Stand there, "They" said to them. 

"Which is the one who lives next door to the hos- 
pital ?" an officer asked. 

Leonard stepped forward. 

"Is it not true that the Lady Superior of the Hos- 
pital organized her people for the purpose of firing 
on our wounded with rifles'?" 

Leonard replied: 

"I am sure that it is not so. And even if she were 
to order it, they would not obey." 

"Do you know what you are in danger of in tell- 
ing lies? We have seen the bullets come from the 
hospital. We are sure. Go write your deposition." 

"I can't do it," answered Leonard. 

He was forced to write his deposition. When he 
had finished it, he presented it to the chief. 

"Sign it, and follow me. I am sure that I saw 



314 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

bullets come from that part of the street. Certainly 
men were there who fired on our chiefs." 

They also said to him that our chasseurs had fired 
on them from the chateau of Madame de Lambertye, 
and they themselves went to get a statement at the 
spot to see if it was possible to hit a man from the 
chateau and kill him. 

I had seen the turrets of the chateau of Lambertye 
burning about half-past nine in the morning and all 
the upper part. That was by incendiary bombs. 
The day after the fires we saw empty cans, about 
sixty of them, the kind used for motor-car gasoline, 
lying about in the garden of the chateau. 

Besides all that, there are still the bodily indig- 
nities which must not be passed over in silence. The 
twenty- fourth and twenty-fifth, "they" used fire and 
blood. The following days "they" amused them- 
selves by teasing everybody. The poor Monsieur 
Jacob, who makes lemonade, was struck and thrown 
to the ground. Then they spit in his face, and 
threatened to shoot him, without any reason. 

They were drunk with the wine of Gerbeviller, if 
one is to judge from their helmets, which had lost 
their lightning conductors. 

The sacred images of the church were not re- 
spected. It was the evening of the twenty-ninth. A 
soldier-priest, Monsieur the Abbe Bernard, went to 
see a tiny bit of what was taking place. 



SISTER JULIE 315 

"Do you know, my sister, what has been clone 
to the ciborium (sacred vessel for the sacrament) ^" 

I went with him. We came to the church. We 
entered with difficulty. A bell blocked us from 
passing, and shells had broken down the vaulting in 
many places. We went on our way, but always with 
difficulty. We saw the crucifix which had the feet 
broken by blow on blow from the butt-end of rifles. 
We still went on, and saw the pipes of the organ 
lying on the ground. We came in front of the taber- 
nacle (the box which holds the sacred vessels). 
There we counted eighteen bullet holes which had 
perforated the door around the lock. The displace- 
ment of air produced by the bursting of the bullet 
had forced the screws to jump out. "They" had not 
thought that this little dwelling-place was a strong- 
box and that it had flat bolts, both vertical and hori- 
zontal. We were now agitated to see if anything 
else had taken place in the tabernacle. 

Monsieur, the Abbe Bernard, took a hammer, and 
as gently as he could he succeeded in making a little 
opening just large enough for one to see that there 
was something else inside. With the barrel of an 
unloaded gun, he then made a full opening. The 
ciborium, the sacred vessel, was uncovered and had 
been projected against the bottom. The cover, 
fallen to one side, had a number of bullet marks, as 
the ciborium itself had. 



316 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

The bullets in penetrating the front of the taber- 
nacle had made everywhere little holes, and these 
holes were in a shape nearly symmetrical around the 
lock. At the rear there were many much larger holes. 

Monsieur, the Abbe, took those sacred things and 
the cover of the altar and carried them to the chapel. 

The 17 th and the 60th Bavarian Regiments were 
the ones that did this work. One-third at least of 
these men were protestant, and among them were 
many returned convicts. 

One of our sisters saw a book of a German officer 
who was nursed here, and noticed that he was from 
Bitsch. 

(Bitsch is a Roman Catholic town in Lorraine 
which long belonged to France, and which held out 
against the Germans almost to the end of the Franco- 
Prussian War). 

"How is this 2" she asked. "You are from Bitsch, 
and yet it is you who dare to do the things that you 
have done." 

"We are under orders," he answered. "The fur- 
ther we go into France, the worse we shall do. It 
is commanded. Otherwise we shall be killed our- 
selves." 

Let us return to the Germans who were applying 
fire and blood. They led away fifteen men, old men, 
to a shed at about quarter past ten. Later they 
made them leave the shed. General Clauss, who 



SISTER JULIE 317 

was in command of two regiments, was sitting un- 
der the oak tree which you will be able to see on 
your return trip. He was in front of a table charged 
with champagne, and was drinking, during the time 
that his soldiers were arranging the poor unhappy 
old men, getting them ready to be shot. They had 
bound them in groups of five, and they shot them in 
three batches. They now lie buried in the same 
spot. 

The General said: "When I have, filled my cup 
and as I raise it to my lips, give them fire and blood." 

We said good-by to Sister Julie. I walked down 
the street to the ruins of the chateau of Lambertye. 
Sister Julie has told of the empty gasoline cans that 
were left in the garden of the chateau. They had 
served their purpose well : I stepped through the lit- 
ter that was once a beautiful home. But there was 
one work which flaming oil could not do. I went 
into the garden, and came to the grotto of the cha- 
teau. It is a lovely secret place, hidden behind a 
grove, and under the shadow of a great rock. It 
glows red from the fundamental stone of its struc- 
ture, with jewel-like splinters of many-colored peb- 
bles sunk in the parent stone. Fire, the favorite Ger- 
man instrument for creating a new world, could not 
mar the stout stone and pebbles of the little place, 
but such beauty must somehow be obliterated. So 



318 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

the careful soldiers mounted ladders and chipped to 
pieces some of the ceiling, painfully with hammers. 
The dent of the hammers is visible throughout the 
vaulting. The mosaic was too tough even for their 
patience, and they had to leave it mutilated but not 
destroyed. 

Several times in Gerbeviller we see this infinite 
capacity for taking pains. The thrusting of the 
baker into his own oven is a touch that a less 
thoughtful race could never have devised. When 
they attacked the tabernacle containing the sacra- 
mental vessel of the Roman Catholic church, Sister 
Julie has told how they placed the eighteen bullets 
that defiled it in pattern. The honest methodical 
brain is behind each atrocity, and the mind of the 
race leaves its mark even on ruins. 

Finally, when they shot the fifteen white-haired 
old men, the murders were done in series, in sets of 
five, with a regular rhythm. I can produce photo- 
graphs of the dead bodies of these fifteen old men 
as they lay grouped on the meadow. We stood un- 
der the oak tree where the officer sat as he drank his 
toasts to death. We looked over to the little spot 
where the old men were herded together and mur- 
dered. Leon Mirman, Prefect of Meurthe-et-Mo- 
selle, said to us as we stood there: 

"I, myself, came here at the beginning of Septem- 
ber/ 1914/ Fifteen old men were here, lying one 



SISTER JULIE 319 

upon the other, in groups of five. I saw them, their 
clothes drooping. One was able to see also by their 
attitude that two or three had been smoking their 
pipes just before dying. Others held their packets 
of tobacco in their hands. I saw these fifteen 
hostages, fifteen old men, some ten days after they 
had been killed; the youngest must have been sixty 
years of age. 

"We shall set up here a commemorative monu- 
ment which will tell to future generations the thing 
that has taken place here." 

For centuries the race has lived on a few episodes, 
short as the turn of a sunset. The glancing helmet 
of Hector that frightened one tiny child, the tooth- 
less hound of Ulysses that knew the beggar man — 
always it is the little lonely things that shake us. 
Vast masses of men and acres of guns blur into un- 
reality. The battle hides itself in thick clouds, 
swaying in the night. But the cry that rang through 
Gerbeviller does not die away in our ears. Sister 
Julie has given episodes of a bitter brevity which 
the imagination of the race will not shake off. It 
is impossible to look out on the world with the same 
eyes after those flashes of a new bravery, a new hor- 
ror. I find this sudden revelation in the lifting of 
the cup with the toast that signed the death of the 
old men. The officer was drinking a sacrament of 
death by murder. It is as if there in that act under 



32o OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

the lonely tree in the pleasant fields of Gerbeviller 
the new religion of the Germans had perfected its 
rite. 

That rite of the social cup, held aloft in the eyes 
of comrades, has been a symbol for good will in all 
the ages. Brotherhood was being proclaimed as the 
host of the feast looked out on a table of comrades. 
At last in the fullness of time the rite, always hon- 
ored, was lifted into the unassailable realm of poetry, 
when one greater man came who went to his death 
blithely from the cup that he drank with his friends. 
There it has remained homely and sacred in the 
thought of the race. 

Suddenly under the oak tree of Gerbeviller the 
rite has received a fresh meaning. The cup has been 
torn from the hands of the Nazarene. By one 
gesture the German officer reversed the course of 
history. He sat there very lonely, and he drank 
alone. The cup that he tasted was the death of 
men. 

It is no longer the lifting of all to a common fel- 
lowship. It no longer means "I who stand here am 
prepared to die for you" : pledge of a union stronger 
even than death. It is suddenly made the symbol of 
a greater gospel: "I drink to your death. I drink 
alone." 



ADDENDUM 

IN the month of November, 19 15, the "Ameri- 
can Hostels for Refugees'' were founded by 
Mrs. Wharton and a group of American 
friends in Paris to provide lodgings and a restaurant 
for the Belgians and French streaming in from burn- 
ing villages and bombarded towns. These people 
were destitute, starving, helpless and in need of im- 
mediate aid. The work developed into an organi- 
zation which cares permanently for over 4,000 refu- 
gees, chiefly French from the invaded regions. A 
system of household visiting has been organized, and 
not even temporary assistance is now given to any 
refugee whose case has not been previously investi- 
gated. The refugees on arrival are carefully regis- 
tered and visited. Assistance is either in the form 
of money toward paying rent, of clothing, medical 
care, tickets for groceries and coal, tickets for one 
of the restaurants of the Hostels, or lodgings in one 
of the Model Lodging Houses. Over 6,000 refu- 
gees have been provided with employment. 

There are six centers for the work. One house 
has a restaurant where 500 meals a day are served 

321 



322 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

at a charge of 10 centimes a meal, and an "Ouvroir" 
where about 50 women are employed under a dress- 
maker, with a day-nursery, an infant-school, a li- 
brary and recreation room. Another center is a 
Rest-house for women and children requiring rest 
and careful feeding. Young mothers are received 
here after the birth of their children, and children 
whose mothers are in hospital. Sixty meals a day 
are served here with a special diet for invalids. An- 
other center contains a clothing depot, which has 
distributed nearly 100,000 garments, including suits 
of strong working clothes for the men placed in fac- 
tories; layettes, and boots. In the same building are 
Dispensary and Consultation rooms. Twenty to 
thirty patients are cared for daily at the Dispensary. 
Another house contains the Grocery Depot, and an- 
other the office for coal-tickets. An apartment house, 
and two other houses have been made into lodging 
houses. The apartment lets out rooms at rents vary- 
ing from 8 to 1 5 francs a month. One of the houses 
contains free furnished lodgings for very poor 
women with large families of young children. These 
three houses have met the need of cheap sanitary 
lodgings in place of damp, dirty rooms at high rents, 
where sick and well were herded together, often in 
one filthy bed. 

Such is the work of the "American Hostels for 
Refugees." The present cost of maintaining all the 



ADDENDUM 323 

branches of this well-organized charity is about five 
thousand dollars a month. 

Mrs. Wharton has also established "American 
Convalescent Homes for Refugees." Many refu- 
gees come broken in health, with chronic bronchitis 
and incipient tuberculosis and even severer maladies. 
Seventy-one beds are provided. There is also a 
house where 30 children, suffering from tuberculosis 
of the bone and of the glands are being cared for. 
Four thousand dollars a month should be provided 
at once for this work. 

At the request of the Belgian Government Mrs. 
Wharton has founded the "Children of Flanders 
Rescue Committee." The bombardment of Furnes, 
Ypres, Poperinghe and the villages along the Yser 
drove the inhabitants south. The Belgian Govern- 
ment asked Mrs. Wharton if she could receive 60 
children at 48 hours' notice. The answer was "yes," 
and a home established. Soon after, the Belgian 
Government asked Mrs. Wharton to receive five or 
six hundred children. Houses were at once estab- 
lished, and these houses are under the management 
of the Flemish Sisters who brought the children from 
the cellars of village-homes, from lonely farm- 
houses, in two cases from the arms of the father, 
killed by a fragment of shell. Lace-schools, sewing 
and dress-making classes, agriculture and gardening 
are carried on. Seven hundred and thirty-five chil- 



324 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

dren are cared for. The monthly expense is 8,000 
francs. 

One of the most important charities in which Mrs. 
Wharton, Mrs. Edward Tuck, and Judge Walter 
Berry are interested, is that for "French Tubercu- 
lous War Victims," in direct connection with the 
Health Department of the French Ministry of War. 
Nearly 100,000 tuberculous soldiers have already 
been sent back from the French front. They must 
be shown how to get well and receive the chance to 
get well. One hospital is already in operation, and 
three large sanatoria are nearing completion, with 
100 beds each. The object is not only to cure the 
sufferers, but to teach them a trade enabling them 
to earn their living in the country. Tuberculous 
soldiers are comnig daily to the offices of this char- 
ity in ever-increasing numbers asking to be taken 
in. The answer will depend on American gen- 
erosity. 

A group of Americans, headed by Mrs. Robert 
Woods Bliss, whose husband is First Secretary of 
the American Embassy in Paris, have instituted and 
carried on a "Distributing Service" in France. The 
name of the organization is "Service de Distribution 
Americaine." It was established on its present basis 
in December, 19 14, and grew out of personal work 
done by Mrs. Bliss since the beginning of the war. 
The purpose has been to supply hospitals throughout 



ADDENDUM 325 

France with whatever they need. By the end of 
1 9 16, the results were these: 

Number of towns visited 1,290 

Number of hospitals inspected and supplied 3,026 

Number of articles distributed 4,839,902 

The Director of the organization is Russell Gree- 
ley, the secretary of Geoffrey Dodge. The service 
has a garage outside the gates of Paris with ten 
cars and a lorry. All the staff, except the stenog- 
raphers and packers, are volunteers. 

This work for the French is connected with the 
American Distributing Service for the Serbians, 
which was begun by sending the late Charles R. 
Cross, Jr., to Serbia as a member of the American 
Sanitary Commission headed by Dr. R. P. Strong, 
in the spring of 191 5. Mr. Cross made an investi- 
gation of the situation in Serbia at that time from 
the point of view of the American Distributing 
Service. 

In January, 19 16, Mrs. Charles Henry Hawes 
of the Greek Red Cross, wife of Professor Hawes 
of Dartmouth College, Hanover, being on her way 
to Italy and Greece for the purpose of conveying 
relief into Albania through Janina, offered her serv- 
ices to the Distributing Service for the convoying 
and distribution of supplies. Hrs. Hawes's offer 
was accepted and she was furnished with a small 



326 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

fund for the purpose of supplies. Events forestalled 
her, but she succeeded in landing and distributing to 
the last Serbians leaving San Giovanni di Medua, a 
thousand rations. At the same time she took an 
active part in relief work at Brindisi, and distributed 
about a thousand dollars' worth of supplies to the 
Serb refugees passing through that port. 

Meanwhile the French Army Medical Service had 
created the "Mission de Coordination de Secours 
aux Armees d'Orient" for the purpose of distribu- 
ting relief supplies to the Serbian and other Allied 
armies in the Balkans. A member of the Distrib- 
uting Service was appointed a member of the Mis- 
sion, and a fund of 100,000 francs placed at the dis- 
posal of the Distributing Service which thencefor- 
ward cooperated actively in the work of the Mission. 
Urgent representations of the need of help in Corfou 
having been made early in February to the Mis- 
sion by the French Army Medical Service, Mrs. 
Hawes, representing the Distributing Service and 
the Mission jointly, was sent to Corfou where she 
established a soup kitchen and did other valuable 
relief work at Vido. She was later joined at Corfou 
by Countess de Reinach-Foussemagne, Infirmiere 
Deleguee of the Mission. Through these two agents 
the Distributing Service sent to Corfou and distrib- 
uted 197 cases of foodstuffs, clothing, and various 



ADDENDUM 327 

articles needed, 5 cases of medicines and 40 tins of 
paraffine. The Service disbursed for similar pur- 
poses through Mrs. Hawes and Countess de Reinach, 
fifteen thousand francs in cash. It was also instru- 
mental in erecting a monument at Vido to the Serbs 
who died there. 

When the crisis at Corfou was at an end the field 
depot of the Mission was moved to Solonica. There 
the Service distributed to Serbians various shipments 
of relief and hospital supplies : A total of 454 cases. 

The Distributing Service now has ready and is 
preparing to send forward for the Serbian Army a 
laundry outfit, a disinfecting outfit and a complete 
field surgical outfit (portable house for operating 
room equipment and radiograph plant). A ship- 
ment is also going forward for Monastir where the 
field depot of the Mission was established on No- 
vember 22nd, of 5,000 francs' worth of foodstuffs 
and other urgently needed materials, and a larger 
quantity is being accumulated to be sent forward 
without delay. 

In addition, the Distributing Service has sent 
about 2,000 kilos of hospital supplies to the Serbs 
in the Lazaret of Frioul, off Marseille, and a similar 
quantity of material to the hospitals at Sidi-Abdallah 
(Tunis), and elsewhere in Tunisia and Algeria, 
given over to the treatment of Serbians. 



328 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Mrs. Bliss and her friends have also conducted 
a work for "frontier children," dating from August, 
19 14, which has cared for French, Belgian and Al- 
satian children to the number of 1,500. 



APPENDIX 

I 

TO THE READER 

THIS book is only a sign post pointing to the place 
where better men than I have suffered and left a 
record. For those who wish to go further on this 
road I give sources of information for facts which I have 
sketched in outline. 

The full authoritative account of the American Ambu- 
lance Field Service will be found in a book called "Friends 
of France," written by the young Americans who 'drove the 
cars at the front. It is one of the most heartening books that 
our country has produced in the last fifty years. Much of 
our recent writing has been the record of commercial suc- 
cess, of growth in numbers, and of clever mechanical de- 
vices. We have been celebrating the things that result in 
prosperity, as if the value of life lay in comfort and se- 
curity. But the story of these young men is altogether a 
record of work done without pay, under conditions of dan- 
ger that sometimes resulted in wounds and death. Their 
service was given because France was fighting for an idea. 
Risk and sacrifice and the dream of equality are more at- 
tractive to young men than safety, neutrality and commer- 
cial supremacy. 

Those who wish to assure themselves that a healthy na- 
tionalism is the method by which a people serves humanity 

329 



330 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

will find an exalted statement in Mazzini's "The Duties of 
Man." A correction of his overemphasis is contained in 
"Human Nature in Politics," by Graham Wallas. Valu- 
able books on Nationality have been written by Ramsay 
Muir and Holland Rose. Lord Acton's essay on Na- 
tionality in his "The History of Freedom and Other 
Essays" should be consulted. He shows the defects of the 
nation-State. 

On the American aspects of nationality, Emile Hovelaque 
and Alfred Zimmern are the two visitors who have shown 
clear recognition of the spiritual weakness of our coun- 
try, and at the same time have pushed through to the 
cause, and so offered opportunity for amendment. Hove- 
laque's articles in the Revue de Paris of the spring of 
1916 I have summarized in the chapter on the Middle 
West. From Zimmern I have jammed together in what 
follows isolated sentences of various essays. This is of 
course unfair to his thought, but will serve to stimulate 
the reader's interest in looking up the essays themselves. 

"There is to-day no American nation. America consists 
at present of a congeries of nations who happen to be 
united under a common federal government. America is 
not a melting pot. It does not assimilate its aliens. It 
is the old old story of the conflict between human in- 
stincts and social institutions. The human soul can strike 
no roots in the America of to-day. I watched the work- 
ings of that ruthless economic process sometimes described 
as 'the miracle of assimilation.' I watched the steam-roller 
of American industrialism — so much more terrible to me 
in its consequences than Prussian or Magyar tyranny — 
grinding out the spiritual life of the immigrant prole- 
tariat, turning honest, primitive peasants into the helpless 



APPENDIX 



331 



and degraded tools of the Trust magnate and the Tammany 
boss. Nowhere in the world as in the United States have 
false theories of liberty and education persuaded states- 
men on so large a scale to make a Babel and call it a 
nation.'* 

And the remedy*? 

"Those make the best citizens of a new country who, 
like the French in Canada and Louisiana, or the Dutch 
in South Africa, bear with them on their pilgrimage, and 
religiously treasure in their new homes, the best of the 
spiritual heritage bequeathed them by their fathers." 

Alfred Zimmern is the author of "The Greek Common- 
wealth," contributor to the "Round Table" and one of 
the promoters of the Workers Educational Association. 
Those who wish to get his full thought on Nationality 
should consult the pamphlet "Education and the Work- 
ing Class," the volume "International Relationships in the 
Light of Christianity," and the Sociological Review for 
July, 1912, and October, 1915. 

The most penetrating recent articles on the American 
democracy as opposed to the cosmopolitanism of the melt- 
ing pot were written by Horace M. Kallen in issues of 
the New York Nation of February, 1915. Dr. Kallen 
is a Jewish pupil of the late William James, of out- 
standing ability, the spiritual leader of the younger genera- 
tion of Jews. He has touched off a group of thinkers on 
the American problem, of whom one is Randolph Bourne. 

Those interested in the interweaving of French and 
early American history should read the book by Ambassador 
Jusserand, called "With Americans of Past and Present 
Days." 

A careful investigation of the myth-making machinery 



332 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

used by nations in war-time is given by Fernand van 
Langenhove in "The Growth of a Legend" — a study based 
upon the German accounts of francs-tireurs and "wicked 
priests" in Belgium. It is made up of German documents. 

A fuller study of the German letters and diaries is 
contained in the pamphlets of Professor Joseph Bedier, 
the books of Professor J. H. Morgan, and the volumes by 
Jacques de Dampierre "L'Allemagne et le Droit des Gens" 
and "Garnets de Route de Combattants Allemands." 
After an examination of these German documents, no 
student will speak of German atrocities as "alleged." The 
most careful collection of testimony by eye-witnesses is 
that contained in the report of the French Government 
Commission, "Rapports et Proces-Verbaux D'Enquete." 
I have personally examined several of the witnesses to this 
report. They are responsible witnesses. Their testimony 
is accurately rendered in the Government record. I trust 
that some American of high responsibility, such as Pro- 
fessor Stowell, of the Department of International Law at 
Columbia University, will make an exhaustive study of the 
German documents held by the French Ministry of War. 

For the peasant incidents in the last section of my book, 
I refer to the book by Will Irwin, "The Latin at War," 
as independent corroboration. 



II 



TO NEUTRAL CRITICS 

CERTAIN points in my testimony have been chal- 
lenged by persons sitting in security, three thousand 
miles away from the invaded country, where at my 
own cost and risk I have patiently gathered the facts on 
which I have based my statements. 

I have built my testimony on three classes of evidence. 

First: The things I have seen. I have given names, 
places and dates. 

Second: The testimony of eye-witnesses, made to me in 
the presence of men and women, well-known in France, 
England and America. These eye-witnesses I have used in 
precisely the same way in which a case is built up in the 
courts of law. 

Third: The diaries and letters written by Germans in 
which they describe the atrocities they have committed. I 
have seen the originals of these documents. 

It is noticeable that the specific fact has never been 
challenged. The date has never been found misplaced, the 
place has never been confused, the person has never been de- 
clared non-existent. The denial has always been in blanket 
form. 

The New York Evening Post says : After the spy came 
the invasion, and after the invasion came the 'steam roller/ 

333 



334 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

flattening out Belgium. This is all given in a general 
way." 

It is given with exact specifications. 

Clement Wood, in the Socialist paper, The New York 
Call, writes: "This book attempts more of a summing up 
of German offenses, and, being written to sustain an opinion 
rather than to give impartially the facts, correspondingly 
loses in interest and persuasiveness. Its usefulness to the 
general reader or the person who desires an unbiased un- 
derstanding of the conflict is slight." He speaks of "the 
alleged German atrocities in Belgium." 

My statements do not deal with opinion but with things 
seen. Apparently it is an offense to take sides on this war. 
One is a truthworthy witness if one has seen only pic- 
turesque incidents that do not reveal the method of warfare 
practiced by an invading army. One is fair-minded only 
by shutting the eyes to the burned houses of Melle, Ter- 
monde and Lorraine, and the dead bodies of peasants; and 
by closing the ears to the statements of outraged persons. 
One is judicial only by defending the Germans against the 
acts of their soldiers, and the written evidence of their offi- 
cers and privates. 

The Independent says: "He saw the wreck of the con- 
vent school, but learned none of the sisters had been 
harmed." 

The critic selects that portion of my testimony on the 
convent school which relieves the Germans of the charge of 
rape. As always, I have given every bit of evidence in 
favor of the Germans that came my way. I have told of 
the individual soldier who was revolted by his orders. I 
have published the diaries of German soldiers which re- 
vealed nobility. But is that scrupulous care of mine a jus- 



APPENDIX 335 

tification to the Independent for omitting to tell the hu- 
miliations visited on that convent school*? 

My testimony of bayonetted dying peasants is "credible 
in so far as no testimony from the other side was obtain- 
able." 

"Mr. Gleason also saw the ruins of bombarded Belgian 
cities." 

Is it fair of the Independent to be inaccurate? My evi- 
dence is not of bombarded Belgian cities. It is of Belgian 
cities, burned house by house, with certain houses spared 
where "Do not burn by incendiary methods" was chalked 
on the door. 

"Otherwise his evidence is at second or third hand 
mainly." 

On the contrary, I have quoted witnesses whom I can pro- 
duce. 

The Times, of Los Angeles, says: "He is quite rabid. 
He writes with the frenzy of a zealot." 

I do not think the colorless recitation of facts, fortified 
by name, place and date, is Tabid or frenzied. 

The Literary Digest says: "Of the 'atrocities' in Bel- 
gium, we find reports of a 'friend,' or a 'friend's friend,' 
or what 'some one saw or heard.' " 

I have told what I myself saw and heard. 

"Fair-minded readers will be inclined to reserve judg- 
ment." 

But in the light cast by eye-witnesses and German diaries, 
we have reserved judgment too long. Our American Revo- 
lution would have been a drearier affair, if the French had 
reserved judgment. In a crisis the need is to form a judg- 
ment in time to make it tell for the cause of justice. Truth- 
seeking is a living function of the mind. 



33^ OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

Another critic says: "By careful reading one sees that, 
while it pretends to give real evidence, there isn't any that 
is real except where not essential. Mr. Gleason attempts to 
belittle the stories of priests inciting girls to deeds of vio- 
lence." 

I do not attempt to belittle those stories. I disprove 
them on the evidence given by German generals, whose 
names I cite. Because I defend Roman Catholic priests 
from slander does not mean that I am anti-Protestant. Be- 
cause I prove that Belgium and France have suffered in- 
justice does not mean that I am anti-German. I went over 
to find out whether Belgian and French peasants, old men, 
women and children, were a lawless, murderous mob, or 
whether the German military had sinned in burning their 
homes and shooting the non-combatants. Neutrals can not 
have it both ways — either the peasants were guilty, or the 
German Army was guilty. I found it was the German 
Army that had sinned. 

This critic goes on to say: "Only a few years ago the 
entire world was shocked by the horrible atrocities carried 
on in the Congo." 

Evidently those atrocities were proved to his satisfaction. 
But was the case not established by the same process I have 
used — personal observation, documentary proof, and the 
testimony of eye-witnesses? 

The Post-Dispatch, of St. Louis, says : "Gleason in try- 
ing to make out a strong case against Germany goes too far. 
He is too venomous. It will be a hard thing to convince 
neutral Americans that German soldiers maliciously ran 
their bayonets through the backs of girl children. The 
volume would be of much greater historical value if Glea- 



APPENDIX 337 

son had used his head more and his heart less." Dr. 
Hamilton, in The Survey, makes the same point. 

In my testimony I detail my evidence, and they who deny 
it rest on general statements. I assure them it is not in 
lightness that I record these conclusions about the German 
Army. I have gone into the zone of fire to bring out Ger- 
man wounded. I have taken the same hazards as thousands 
of other men have taken to save German life. Does venom 
act so? 

I find in these criticisms an underlying assumption, a 
mental attitude, toward war, and therefore toward facts 
about war. Some of these periodicals are sincere pacifists. 
In the cause of social reform, in their several and very 
different ways, they have served the common good. But 
because they believe war is the worst of all evils, they as- 
sume that both sides are equally guilty or equally foolish. 
It is not a mental attitude which leaves them open-minded. 
I want to ask them on what body of facts they base their 
criticism. Were they present in Belgium at the moment 
of impact? Has the German Government provided them 
with detailed documentary proof that in the villages I have 
mentioned, on the dates given, the persons I have named 
were not burned, were not bayonetted? Have they exam- 
ined the originals of the German diaries and found that I 
have omitted or altered words? Have they spent many 
days in Lorraine taking testimony from cure and sister and 
Mayor and peasant? Has that testimony shown that the 
destruction and murder did not take place? Has Leon 
Mix man, Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle, given them a state- 
ment in which he retracts what he said to me ? 

Several of these critics happen to be personal friends. It 
would be impossible to write in resentment of anything they 



338 OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR 

say. I am not interested in making out a case for myself. 
But I am very much interested in inducing my fellow coun- 
trymen to accept the facts of the present world struggle. 
My books about the war have been written with one pur* 
pose only — to bring home to Americans the undeserved suf» 
fering of Belgium and France. To do that I need the help 
of all men of good will. I ask them not to break the force 
of the facts which I have patiently collected, by the care- 
lessness which calls systematically burned cities "bom- 
barded" cities, and by the mental attitude which finds me 
"rabid," when I have given every favoring incident to Ger- 
man soldiers that I could find. I have spent nearly two 
years in observing the facts of this war. Against my desires, 
my pre-war philosophy, my hopes of internationalism, I was 
driven by the facts to certain conclusions. 



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